U.S. National Parks Visitor Comparison

How to use this page

Hover any cell to highlight its full row. The sorted column, 2023 visits, gets an extra spotlight.
Click a park name to write a custom briefing in the analysis box under the table.
Click a column header with a dashed underline for a short definition of that metric.
Hover a glossary term to slide its definition open. Move away to hide it again.

Most-visited U.S. national parks, 2023

Rows are pre-sorted by 2023 recreation visits, highest first. Figures are National Park Service recreation-visit counts (rounded). Area is park acreage. Established year is the year the unit became a national park (not always the year it was first protected).

Table 1. Twelve U.S. national parks ranked by 2023 recreation visits. Click a park name for a briefing. Click underlined headers for metric tips.

Park	2023 visits	State(s)	Established	Area (acres)	Highest point (ft)	Overnight stays (2023)
Great Smoky Mountains	13,297,647	TN / NC	1934	522,427	6,643	1,102,418
Grand Canyon	4,733,705	AZ	1919	1,201,647	9,180	1,437,291
Zion	4,623,238	UT	1919	147,243	8,726	643,881
Yellowstone	4,501,382	WY / MT / ID	1872	2,219,791	11,358	1,812,407
Rocky Mountain	4,115,837	CO	1915	265,807	14,259	445,219
Yosemite	3,897,070	CA	1890	759,620	13,114	1,612,903
Acadia	3,879,390	ME	1919	49,075	1,530	512,774
Grand Teton	3,410,626	WY	1929	310,044	13,775	703,558
Joshua Tree	3,270,404	CA	1994	795,156	5,814	548,201
Olympic	2,947,503	WA	1938	922,650	7,980	612,440
Glacier	2,908,458	MT	1910	1,013,322	10,466	524,117
Cuyahoga Valley	2,860,059	OH	2000	32,572	1,164	41,882

Park briefing

Click any park name in the table to drop a short briefing here. The text pulls visits, location, size, founding year, high point, and overnight stays into one paragraph you can use for trip planning or a class comparison.

Walkthrough: two ways to read the grid

These examples are meant to be clicked. Each one highlights the matching table rows and writes a comparison into the briefing box.

Example 1: Fame is not the same as foot traffic

Grand Canyon is the postcard park, but it is not the busiest. Click this paragraph to compare Great Smoky Mountains (13.3 million visits) with Grand Canyon (4.7 million visits). The Smokies sit on a free, no-reservation highway between two large metro regions. The Canyon is larger and taller, but most visitors still have to travel into northern Arizona, pay an entrance fee, and often wait for parking. Visits tell you about access. Acreage and elevation tell you about the landscape.

Click the paragraph above (or either park name in the table) to run the comparison highlight.

Example 2: A small urban park can outdraw a wilderness giant

Now compare Yellowstone, the oldest and largest park in this list, with Cuyahoga Valley, a 32,572-acre park between Cleveland and Akron that only became a national park in 2000. Click this paragraph. Yellowstone still leads in overnight stays because people plan multi-day trips. Cuyahoga’s visit count is close to Glacier and Olympic because locals can drop in for an afternoon on the Towpath Trail. If you only ranked parks by wilderness reputation, you would miss this pattern.

Click the paragraph above to spotlight Yellowstone and Cuyahoga Valley together.

Glossary

Hover a term. The definition slides open. Move the pointer away and it slides shut.

Recreation visits: The National Park Service count of recreational entries in a calendar year. It is not unique visitors. Someone who enters three times counts as three visits. This is the core column in the table and the sort key.
Overnight stays: Nights spent in park lodging, campgrounds, backcountry sites, and similar in-park beds. A park can have huge day-visit numbers and relatively few overnight stays if most people live nearby or stay outside the boundary.
Area (acres): Official land area of the park. Useful for density questions: visits divided by acres is a rough crowding signal, not a measure of trail quality.
Established: Year the unit was designated a national park. Some places were monuments, recreation areas, or forests first. Cuyahoga Valley (2000) is young as a park but old as a protected landscape.
Highest point (ft): Highest named summit or rim elevation inside the park, in feet. A proxy for mountain character. Acadia and Cuyahoga are coastal or river-valley parks with much lower high points than Rocky Mountain or Grand Teton.
State(s): The state or states that contain the park. Multi-state parks (Great Smoky Mountains, Yellowstone) often sit on regional travel routes, which helps explain visit volume.

About the numbers

Visit and overnight figures are rounded from National Park Service 2023 recreation statistics. Acreage and establishment years follow NPS park profiles. Use this page as a teaching grid, not as an official statistical release. If you need exact counts for a paper, go back to the NPS visitor-use statistics site.