Bad economy can't beat nature

Bad economy can't beat nature

By Lee Davidson, Deseret News
Published: February 23, 2009

As the economy has soured, visits have soared at Utah's national parks and monuments, as more locals apparently are vacationing nearby to spend less on travel.

"People certainly are staying a little closer to home and making a lot of shorter trips," said Paul Henderson, spokesman for National Park Service sites near Moab. He said the lion's share of visits there come from people nearby in Utah and Colorado.

The 13 National Park system units in Utah reported 8.8 million recreational visits overall in 2008. That was up by a quarter-million visits over 2007 (or 3.2 percent), and up by more than a half-million visits over 2006 (or 6.8 percent), new data shows.

Henderson is also acting superintendent of Arches National Park, which set an all-time record with 928,000 recreational visits last year. That was up by 68,000 visitors (or 8 percent) over 2007, and up a whopping 200,000 visits (or 25 percent) in the past five years since 2004.

"I think it's a combination of several things," including people from the growing Wasatch Front in Utah and Colorado's Front Range traveling more to nearby Moab, he said.

"There's a whole lot of people who have figured out that Moab's only four or five hours away. So our season now tends to start earlier in the spring … and it goes longer into the fall," he said. "A lot of that is regional travel. It's folks who realize that when you've still got a couple of feet of snow on the ground, they're golfing in Moab."

Another twist of the recent bad economy also has fueled more visits to Utah parks.

"The dollar was weak against European currencies. There were times in July last summer that you could go into City Market (in Moab) and not hear English. I mean, there was very strong foreign visitation here," Henderson said.

The increased visits also come while funding in most Utah parks has dwindled. The Deseret News last summer reported that visitation in Utah parks was up more than the national average from 2003-07, but cuts in employees were deeper than average — and operations budgets in most Utah parks fell further behind inflation than average nationally.

In 2008, the most-visited park in Utah was Zion, which had 2.7 million recreational visits, up 1.2 percent (or an extra 33,000 visitors) from the previous year.

Zion finished No. 8 among all national parks in the country for recreational visits behind, in order, Great Smoky Mountains, Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Olympic, Yellowstone, Cuyahoga Valley and Rocky Mountain.

While Arches had the biggest increase among Utah parks by number of visits, Rainbow Bridge National Monument had the biggest increase by percentage: up 17 percent to nearly 95,600. That came as waters in Lake Powell, used by many boaters to access the monument, rose from severely low levels in recent years that had been caused by drought.

Visitation to Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, the formal Park Service name for Lake Powell on the Utah-Arizona border, was up by 53,400 visitors last year (2.8 percent) for a total of 1.9 million visits, the second-highest total among National Park units in the state.

Amid the overall increase in visitors statewide, some Utah parks managed to lose visitors — sometimes a lot.

For example, visitation to Dinosaur National Monument has plummeted in recent years as its main attraction — a visitor's center that encloses a cliff face where hundreds of dinosaur fossils were carefully revealed in place — has been closed as unsafe for years. Rep. Jim Matheson, D-Utah, has said money from the new stimulus bill will help with repairs there.

In the meantime, visitation at Dinosaur fell to just 202,000 people last year — down 13 percent from 2007. It is down 44 percent (almost half) since 2005, when the park had 361,000 visitors.

Visitation was also down by 11 percent (to 40,000 visitors) at Golden Spike National Historic Site, and by 3 percent (to 25,000 visitors) at remote Hovenweep National Monument.

Visitation at other park units was up by 50,000 visitors (9 percent) at Capitol Reef National Park, up 9,000 visitors (8 percent) at Timpanogos National Monument, up 19,000 visitors (5 percent) at Canyonlands National Park, up 2,600 visitors (5 percent) at Cedar Breaks National Monument, up 133 (4 percent) at Natural Bridges National Monument and up 30,800 to 1.04 million at Bryce Canyon National Park.

Not included in the National Park Service numbers is Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, because it is administered by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.

E-mail: lee@desnews.com
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