Here's what a million-plus visitors a year mean to Saguaro National Park

The cactus crush continued at Saguaro National Park in 2023.

For the third time in the past five years, annual visitation topped 1 million at the park bracketing Tucson.

The 1,010,906 recreation visits logged by the National Park Service last year were the third most in Saguaro’s 90-year history, first as a national monument, then a national park. Until 2019, the park had never seen more than 1 million visitors in a single year.

“We are no longer a small park,” said Perri Spreiser, the district ranger for interpretation at Saguaro’s Rincon Mountain District.

The impact is easy to see, according to Fred Stula, executive director of the nonprofit Friends of Saguaro National Park. Just drive out to the east end of Broadway or Speedway on a sunny day in spring and try to find a space in one of the trailhead parking lots.

“There are cars parked on the street that go half a mile in both directions,” Stula said. “You can definitely see the need for increased parking and increased opportunities for people to access the park.”

Congestion is also increasingly common at Saguaro’s east and west visitor centers, especially in March, typically the busiest month at the park.

Though it varies year-to-year, visitation has increased by almost 50% overall since 2013, when Saguaro saw fewer than 680,000 recreation visits. The current surge to 1 million visitors and beyond began in 2017, though it was briefly interrupted by the pandemic, which sent the figure back down below 765,000 in 2020.

Nationwide, 2023 ranked as the fourth busiest in Park Service history, with 325,498,646 visitors at 394 sites managed by the agency from Alaska to the U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam to Puerto Rico.

So far, though, Saguaro appears to have avoided many of the problems plaguing other popular parks close to urban areas. Both Spreiser and Stula said the sharp rise in visitor volume has not resulted in an increase in crime, vandalism or even litter.

As Stula put it: “The community takes a lot of pride in the park, and they’re not going to let things fall apart.”

Recent feedback from the public seems to back that up.

As part of a larger visitor use study early last year, officials conducted a survey in the park to find out where people were coming from and what they were there to see and do. More than 1,500 visitors were interviewed at various locations, and a sizable majority of them said they found Saguaro to be clean, safe and not too crowded.

“Visitors do not perceive crowding in Saguaro National Park yet, which is really nice to hear,” Spreiser said. “It’s still nice and quiet out there.”

Helpful Friends

Even as attendance has exploded in recent years, Stula said, Saguaro has seen its federal funding “flatline,” preventing the park’s workforce from growing along with its visitation. Spreiser said Saguaro has roughly the same number of “uniformed staff” now as it did a decade ago.

That’s where the Friends of Saguaro National Park come in.

Since it was founded in 1996, Saguaro’s nonprofit fundraising partner has provided $12 million in support to the park, Stula said. “We are able to provide funding for stuff the park wouldn’t otherwise be able to do.”

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For example, he said, the park’s environmental education programs are entirely paid for by the Friends.

Last year alone, the group and its donors supplied Saguaro with $671,000, its largest yearly contribution to date. And that figure did not include the hundreds of volunteers and thousands of hours of work the Friends have provided for trail maintenance and other work.

Then there is the group’s Next Generation Ranger Corps Internship Program, which has placed more than 100 paid temporary workers at the park since 2015.

Stula said the goal of the program is to supply Saguaro with some much needed personnel while helping “diverse young people to get their foot in the door” at the park service and other federal agencies.

He said 58% of interns are women, and 76% come from Latino, Indigenous or other historically underserved communities.

Nearly every graduate of the program has gone on to work in the environmental field, including 38 who have landed jobs with federal agencies. Eighteen former interns are now on the permanent staff at Saguaro, Stula said.

Upgrades coming

The Park Service hopes to address some of its congestion issues starting next year with a major construction project at the Rincon Mountain Visitor Center.

The work will more than double the current number of parking spaces and add spots large enough for buses and recreational vehicles. It should also improve visitor safety by rerouting the entrance road between Old Spanish Trail and the fee stations to separate it from the parking lot.

The project represents the first major upgrade to the visitor center parking lot since the early 1950s, when fewer than 80,000 people a year visited what was then a national monument limited only to the Rincon Mountains.

President John F. Kennedy expanded the monument to include portions of the Tucson Mountains in 1961, and Congress elevated the land to national park status in 1994.

The final designs and cost estimates for the visitor center upgrade have not been released, but Spreiser said the work will be funded in part with the additional entrance fee revenue Saguaro has received as a result of its increased visitation.

She said no changes would be made to Cactus Forest Drive, the iconic, one-lane scenic loop through the Rincon foothills that dates back to the earliest days of the national monument in the 1930s and is considered “part of the historic character” of the park.

The Red Hills Visitor Center in the Tucson Mountains is far newer — and so is its parking lot — but Spreiser said it is also due for its first major renovation since it was built in the 1990s.

She said the Park Service just launched the design process for that project, which will focus on a new layout and all new exhibits for the inside of the building.

Park officials have no immediate plans to expand the parking lots at Saguaro’s most popular hiking spots, namely the Broadway and Douglas Springs trailheads on the east side of the park and the King Canyon trailhead on the west side.

Spreiser’s advice: “Come early in the day.” By 9:30 or 10 a.m., parking at some locations can be hard to come by, she said.