Yellowstone visitation neared 3.4 million in 2011, second-highest year on record

Visitors watch Old Faithful geyser erupt from a second-floor observation deck at the Old Faithful Inn. (Ruffin Prevost/Yellowstone Gate - click to enlarge)

Visitors watch Old Faithful geyser erupt from a second-floor observation deck at the Old Faithful Inn. (Ruffin Prevost/Yellowstone Gate - click to enlarge)

From Staff Reports

CODY, Wyo. — The National Park Service reports that nearly 3.4 million people visited Yellowstone National Park in 2011, making it the fifth consecutive year to see more than 3 million visitors.

Overall visitation to Yellowstone for 2011 was 3,394,321. That figure is down 6.8 percent from the record 3,640,184 people who visited the park in 2010, making 2011 the second-highest visitation year on record.

July was the park’s busiest month last year, with 906,934 visitors entering Yellowstone. July accounted for more than 25 percent of Yellowstone’s annual visitation total.

December visitation was down 5 percent compared to 2010, with 16,509 visitors recorded in 2011 compared to 17,386 during the same period in 2010. Scant snow for the opening of the winter season limited the areas within Yellowstone where visitors could use snowmobiles or snow coaches. All of the park has since opened to oversnow vehicles.

In a draft progress report circulated earlier this week for public comment, park managers cited their work to develop a sustainability program to reduce the impacts of visitation and park operations.

The report addresses threats to Yellowstone National Park, and will be submitted to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Public comments on the draft will be included with the final report that is submitted to UNESCO.
Yellowstone was among the initial properties designated as World Heritage Sites by UNESCO in 1978. The U.N. managing committee placed Yellowstone on its list of endangered sites in 1995 and removed it in 2003.

Because relatively few visitors spend much time in Yellowstone’s backcountry, most traffic is heavily focused along roadside attractions and in the park’s developed areas, like Old Faithful.

The top 10 years for visitation in Yellowstone have all come since 1992, and they all saw more than 3 million visitors:

Rank  Year  Visitation

1     2010  3,640,184
2     2011  3,394,321
3     2009  3,295,187
4     2007  3,151,343
5     1992  3,144,405
6     1999  3,131,381
7     1995  3,125,285
8     1998  3,120,830
9     2008  3,066,570
10   1994  3,046,145

One thought on “Yellowstone visitation neared 3.4 million in 2011, second-highest year on record

  1. Except that Yellowstone gatekeepers don;t actually count the number of visitors, head for head. They ballpark that and use statistical modelling , somethin like ” one passenger car = 2.3 people “.

    I went thru Yellowstone’s East Gate about 6-7 times last season , and only once did we encounter a Ranger in the booth , since we often went thru very early in the morning and returned late at night. The mechanical traffic counters record tire scrunches, not human beings. How would they know ?

    As long as the Park Service remains consistent in their data gathering, I suppose this doesn’t really matter ( but that’s not a given). Yet they are disseminating these attendance figures with a degree of accuracy that cannot be so.