To get a better sense of when and how often local outdoor enthusiasts are hitting the trail, the county parks department put out game cameras at four popular county-maintained trailheads last summer.
What they found won’t come as a surprise to many: Tucsonans love their trails.
Between July 2015 and June of this year, cameras at the Sweetwater, Richard Genser, Iris Dewhirst and Gabe Zimmerman trailheads logged about 82,000 users, according to recently released data from Natural Resources, Parks and Recreation Department.
That works out to around 56 users per trail daily.
“It’s great to see that the public is actually using the trails that we built,” said Robert Padilla, department deputy director.
When the 21 additional county-maintained trails are considered, “it is likely public use greatly exceeds the numbers identified in the four monitored trails,” reads a memo from County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry about the findings.
“This type of recreational activity provides both educational and recreation opportunities that would otherwise not be enjoyed, absent trailhead improvements,” the memo goes on to say.
The majority of users were hikers, with bikers, runners, dog walkers and horse riders making up the rest.
The data also shows significant seasonal variation in usage, peaking in the cooler winter months and plummeting in the summer months.
At Sweetwater in northwest Tucson, for example, 3,541 people used the trailhead in January 2016, but just 572 did in July 2015.
Data collection was compromised by vandalism, which was most severe at the Richard Genser trail near Star Pass, where the camera was nonfunctional for portions of six months.
In a memo accompanying the data, parks department Director Chris Cawein said additional monitoring will be done “to the extent feasible so that appropriate data-driven decisions can be made.”
