A TrailVerse Data Investigation

America's Parks
Are Being Loved
to Death

323 million visits in 2025 — the third-highest year in history, even through a 43-day government shutdown. The 10 most popular parks absorb nearly half of all visits while 350+ sit mostly empty and a $23 billion repair bill goes unpaid.

323M 2025 visits · NPS data released March 2026
26 parks set new all-time records in 2025
$23B deferred maintenance backlog
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Photo: Unsplash
2025 NPS data (released March 13, 2026): 323M visits — down 2.7% from 2024's all-time record, but 26 parks still broke their own records. The concentration problem isn't easing.
The 1% Problem

10 parks.
Half the crowd.

America has 63 designated national parks. In 2025, the top 10 absorbed roughly 50% of all national park visits. The bottom 10 shared fewer than 300,000 between them.

Great Smoky Mountains drew 11.53 million visitors in 2025. Kobuk Valley National Park drew 7,786. One park. Same country. Same public land. Nearly 1,500 times the traffic.

11.53M Great Smoky Mountains — America's most visited park (2025)
1,479× More visits at Great Smoky vs. Kobuk Valley NP — same public land
7,786 Visits to Kobuk Valley NP in 2025 — America's least-visited park
323M Total 2025 NPS recreation visits — source: NPS, March 13, 2026
2025 Visits — Top 10 National Parks (millions) · NPS, March 2026
Photo: Unsplash / Ales Krivec
The Instagram Machine

A photo went viral.
A park was never the same.

A peer-reviewed study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Georgia Tech, 2024) is the first to statistically link social media to national park overcrowding. Parks with high social media exposure saw 16–22% more visitors than parks with low exposure. The divergence began in 2013 — the year Instagram and Twitter went mainstream.

+22% More visitors at high-exposure parks vs. low — PNAS study, 2024
2013 When the divergence started — Instagram and Twitter go mainstream
2× Joshua Tree visitation since 2000 — more than doubled from social exposure
+50% Rocky Mountain NP visitation since 2000 — driven by organic viral posts

It's not the parks' own accounts doing it. It's organic visitor content — photos and videos shared and reshared — that drives the most traffic. Posts with negative sentiment actually decrease visits the following year. The algorithm has become America's unofficial park ranger, and it only knows a handful of views.

Visitation trend — High vs. Low social media exposure parks (indexed to 2010)
Photo: Unsplash
What It Actually Does

The bill
that never gets paid.

Overtourism isn't an aesthetic problem — it's a physical one. Trails erode. Wildlife corridors collapse. Hot springs get clogged with coins. And the repair bill keeps compounding — now at $22.986 billion in deferred maintenance across the NPS system, the largest backlog of any federal land agency.

🏔️
$22.986B Deferred maintenance backlog — NPS FY2024 Q4 official figure. Roads, buildings, utility systems, trails. NPS annual budget: under $3.5B.
⚠️
13+ Deaths on Angels Landing, Zion, since 2000. In summer, hundreds attempt the exposed 1,400-ft spine daily — causing dangerous congestion on narrow ledges. This trail was never built for high-volume traffic.
🌿
$100M Estimated repairable visitor-caused damage — trampled meadows, vandalized formations, clogged hot springs. Source: University of Washington / NPS Cooperative Park Studies Unit.
🥾
900+ "Social trails" carved by off-path hikers through Mount Rainier's Paradise Meadows — some 3 feet deep. The park has been replanting trampled areas since the 1950s. More people, same fragile soil.
Photo: Unsplash
The Gatekeepers

9 parks said:
enough.

Timed-entry reservations — book a specific window or you don't get in — are now active at 9 national parks. Arches pioneered the model in 2022, after crowds surged 73% in a single decade, from 1M to 1.8M annual visitors between 2011 and 2021.

A Utah State University study found that 84% of Arches visitors support the reservation system — and more than half said it improved their experience. The pushback comes mostly from those who couldn't get a ticket.

84%support
Of Arches visitors who used the timed-entry system — Utah State Univ. study

The system is under political pressure. In 2026, Arches dropped the requirement during peak summer — a partial retreat. The debate: visitors and ecologists who want fewer people vs. gateway communities and access advocates who argue reservations favor the tech-savvy and wealthy.

Parks with active timed-entry reservation systems
Arches National ParkEst. 2022
Yosemite National ParkEst. 2021
Acadia National ParkEst. 2021
Zion National ParkEst. 2020
Haleakalā National ParkEst. 2017
Rocky Mountain NPEst. 2023
Glacier National ParkEst. 2023
Mount Rainier NPEst. 2023
Shenandoah National ParkEst. 2023
Photo: Unsplash
The Other America

Every famous park
has a twin.

For every landscape the algorithm made famous, there's a near-identical one with a fraction of the crowd. Same geology. Same wildlife. Same public land. The difference is followers. In 2025, low social-media-exposure parks saw flat or declining visitation during the same period the famous parks were overwhelmed.

Zion National Park
4.98M
2025 visits · timed entry required
↔
Capitol Reef NP
~1.4M
2025 visits · no reservations needed
Yosemite National Park
4.28M
2025 visits · timed entry required
↔
Lassen Volcanic NP
~358K
2025 visits · walk-in access, volcanic peaks
Arches National Park
~1.5M
2025 visits · seasonal timed entry
↔
Black Canyon of the Gunnison
~336K
2025 visits · equally dramatic, rarely crowded
Great Smoky Mountains
11.53M
2025 visits · most visited park in the country
↔
Congaree National Park
~242K
2025 visits · SC's only national park, rarely crowded
Photo: Unsplash
Running Out of Time

The parks disappearing
before we even get there.

While overtourism reshapes who visits, climate change is reshaping the parks themselves. Glacier National Park drew 3.14 million visitors in 2025 — partly because people know the glaciers are leaving and want to see them before they're gone. The urgency is accelerating the very damage it fears.

Named glaciers remaining in Glacier National Park, Montana
150
1850
~80
1966
~50
1998
~26
2025

Source: USGS Northern Rocky Mountain Science Center / NPS Glacier National Park. Average glacier size shrunk 39% since 1966. Grinnell Glacier loses 2–10 acres per year on a 115-acre body.

39% Average glacier shrinkage in Glacier NP since 1966 — USGS data
3°C Average temperature rise across Alaska national parks since mid-20th century — NPS
95% Share of Alaskan glaciers experiencing thinning, stagnation, or retreat — NPS
⅓ Of UNESCO World Heritage site glaciers projected to vanish by 2050 — UN report

"These glaciers will be more or less gone in the next several decades," says USGS research ecologist Daniel Fagre. The park will likely keep the name. It won't keep the ice.

Photo: Unsplash
The Verdict

Visit smarter.
Not harder.

The national park system isn't broken — it's unevenly loved. The solution isn't to stop visiting. It's to redistribute that love. Every park on this list is public land. The ones with 7,786 visitors deserve the same attention as the ones with 11 million.

01

Go to the twin, not the icon

For every overcrowded park there's a near-identical one with open trailheads. Black Canyon instead of Arches. Capitol Reef instead of Zion. North Cascades instead of Rainier. Same geology, same silence, no ticket required.

02

Shoulder season changes everything

May, September, and October deliver 60–80% of the scenery with a fraction of the crowd — and in most parks, no reservation needed. The algorithm promotes summer. That's the gap.

03

Before 7am or after 4pm

At every timed-entry park, these windows stay open. The light is better anyway. The parking lot is half-empty. The chain at Angels Landing has room to breathe.

04

The glaciers won't wait

Glacier NP's ice is on a decades-long exit. If it's on your list, don't defer. But go in May or October — not July — when you won't be part of the 3.14 million problem.

Explore All 63 Parks on TrailVerse →
Photo: Unsplash / Robert Bye
SOURCES & METHODOLOGY — Visitor statistics: NPS Visitor Use Statistics Dashboard, 2025 annual data released March 13, 2026 (323,014,305 recreation visits) · Social media & visitation: Wichman, G. (2024). "Social media influences National Park visitation." PNAS, doi:10.1073/pnas.2310417121 · Glacier data: NASA Earth Observatory; USGS Northern Rocky Mountain Science Center · Deferred maintenance: NPS By the Numbers FY2024 Q4 ($22.986B) · Visitor damage: UW / NPS Cooperative Park Studies Unit · Timed entry: NPS.gov individual park pages · All images: Unsplash free license (no attribution required, commercial use allowed)