National parks are among the nation’s most beloved treasures. With locations stretching from remote Alaska wilderness to an urban downtown, their popularity varies, and many of these 63 parks experienced major changes in visitation last year.
Some of them saw massive jumps in visitors, while others took a nosedive, based on preliminary data released by the National Park Service (NPS) last month. GearJunkie crunched the numbers to figure out the biggest outliers and trends.
Here are the main takeaways from 2025’s stats, and what you need to know if you’re planning a national park trip this year.
The Overall Gist
Last year was unusually turbulent for the nation’s park system.
Despite the longest government shutdown in U.S. history and massive layoffs of NPS staff, visitation to the national parks remained strong. A tally of visitors to all 63 parks in 2025 results in a total of 118.1 million visitors. That’s a 0.6% decrease from 2024, but one that can be explained, at least in part, by the 43-day government shutdown, when national parks were technically open, but mostly without staff.
Last year’s visitation numbers continue a steady upward trend of visitation to national parks that has continued for at least the last 10 years (with the exception of the pandemic years in 2020 and 2021).
Many variables can cause changes to visitation numbers, including park staffing cuts and improved technology and methods for collecting data, Cassidy Jones, the National Park Conservation Association’s senior visitation program manager, told GearJunkie. And of course, there’s weather. An unusually long fall season in Acadia or early snowmelt in Glacier can boost numbers by a significant amount.
“Don’t discount the weather, right? Weather and other phenomena often end up being really meaningful for visitation statistics,” Jones said.
To Jones, even with the slight decline in numbers, the data continues to show one thing: People adore the national parks. “Folks definitely are still coming to parks, because people love parks. Across the political spectrum, we’ve seen in polling and across age spectrums, people love parks, and they continue to visit national parks,” she said.
It’s important to note that all data is preliminary and subject to change. NPS data will be finalized by the end of the first quarter of 2026.
North Cascades Is Booming
North Cascades in Washington state is one of the 10 least-visited parks — but it’s on the upswing. It saw a 185% increase in visitors from 2024 to 2025, going from roughly 15,000 to 46,000. This park, most of which is only accessible by ferry, provides many miles of hiking trails through the pristine Cascade mountain range.
The park was hit extremely hard by storms and flooding in December. So, keep an eye on the park’s closure page to see if conditions are back to normal by peak season (July to September). If everything is right and ready by then, 2026 could be the year to visit this park while it’s still (mostly) a hidden gem.
New Parks Saw Decline
From 2013 to 2020, the NPS added five new national parks, and almost all of them saw visitor numbers drop in 2025.
Pinnacles in California, Indiana Dunes in Indiana, and White Sands in New Mexico all saw moderate decreases of 3%, 2.8%, and 6%, respectively.
Gateway Arch National Park in St. Louis, on the other hand, got walloped with a 13.8% decline. This park is in the middle of a downtown area and is the smallest national park by acreage.
The only newbie to see growth was New River Gorge National Park in West Virginia, with a 9.5% increase. The park was only a few thousand visitors away from cracking 2 million in 2025.
Hard Year for Arizona
Multiple Arizona national parks saw visitor numbers drop in 2025.
The NPS only has data on Petrified Forest National Park through Nov. 25, but compared to the same number from Nov. 2024, visitors dropped by 48%.
The Grand Canyon, Arizona’s most famous landmark, also saw a drop of nearly a half-million visitors — a decrease of nearly 10%.
Only time will tell what shrinking tourist numbers might mean for Arizona’s economy. According to the NPS, national park visitors spent $1.4 billion in the state in 2024.
California Parks Explode
Visitors to some of California’s national parks declined slightly (Death Valley, Joshua Tree, and Pinnacles). But massive increases at other parks more than compensated for those losses.
The two standouts were Redwoods and Lassen Volcanic national parks. Redwoods blew up in 2025, with a 91% increase, going from 633,707 visitors to more than 1.2 million.
Lassen Volcanic National Park, located in northeastern California, saw a 41% increase, hitting a total of more than 500,000 visitors. The number of bookings at NPS and backcountry campgrounds increased by more than 20,000.
If these parks are on your travel itinerary for 2026, it’s wise to start planning ahead of time: It’s only going to get harder to nab a campsite as the months go by.
Final Call for Crater Lake
Last year, the NPS announced that a major construction project will begin at Crater Lake National Park in 2026. Crews will renovate one of the park’s most popular trails, the Cleetwood Trail, and the work is expected to last at least 3 years. The marina and all boat tours will be closed during this time.
If we had to bet, this looming closure is behind Crater Lake’s big boom in 2025. The park saw a 21% increase in visitors, going from 554,542 to 670,822. With access to much of the lakeshore closed for the next few years, 2025 will likely mark the park’s highest numbers for the foreseeable future.
Wildfires Deal Major Blows
Wildfires ravaged Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park in Colorado during the summer of 2025. Multiple fires across thousands of acres destroyed much of the park’s infrastructure. Unsurprisingly, this natural disaster made its presence known in the stats. Black Canyon saw a 26.7% decline in visitors compared to 2024, with a total of just 246,097 tourists.
With several campgrounds and trails still closed because of damage from the fire, the forecast for the park’s numbers in 2026 looks less than rosy.
The Grand Canyon also experienced a major 10,000-acre wildfire in 2025, forcing the North Rim to close. This likely explains the 10% decline in visitor numbers for this historically popular park.
The effects of a 3,000-acre wildfire in July in Olympic National Park were smaller: The park saw a 2.6% decline.
Hawaii Numbers Grow
As an existing tourist destination, it makes sense that Hawaii’s national parks have high visitation numbers. If you’re already visiting the islands for a beach vacation, why not tack on a visit to a national park?
Both of the state’s national parks saw major increases in 2025. Hawaii Volcanoes National Park on the Big Island reached over 3.7 million, a 13.4% increase, and Maui’s Haleakalā National Park went up by 16% to 873,871 visitors.
If you want to avoid crowds at these parks, try going in the shoulder seasons (fall and spring). The parks can be extremely busy around the holidays.
*All data is preliminary and subject to change. NPS Data will be finalized by the end of the first quarter of 2026. It is unclear how the 2025 government shutdown may have affected the accuracy of data collection.
National Park Planning for 2026
Are you planning some national park trips for 2026? GearJunkie has guides on backpacking in Joshua Tree, the best national parks to visit in the winter, and the most dog-friendly parks.
If a road trip of California’s nine national parks is on your bucket list, check out this handy guide. We also have some sweet guides to other sites within the national park system, like the always fun national seashores.
