Visitation at Saguaro National Park topped 1 million last year — a new record 🌵

Visitation at Saguaro National Park hit another record high in 2021, and officials there are trying to figure out where all the people are coming from.

The roughly 93,000-acre preserve bracketing Tucson reported 1,079,786 recreational visits last year, an increase of almost 60,000 over the previous record set in 2019.

It marked just the second time annual visitation has topped 1 million in 101 years of record-keeping.

“We really don’t have a slow season anymore,” said Andy Fisher, Saguaro’s chief of interpretation. “People are coming year round, and we’re seeing record visitation almost every month.”

Starting this month, a team of park staff members and volunteers will fan out to interview hikers and sightseers about their experiences as part of the first comprehensive visitor use study at Saguaro since 2004.

The goal is to find out how many visitors are locals and how many are from out of town. Fisher said they are also looking for demographic information about the people in the park, as well as where they like to go, what they like to do and what other amenities they would like to see at Saguaro.

The survey team plans to interview at least 800 visitors in nine days at different times and locations throughout the park. Each person who agrees to take part in the five-minute survey will be given a longer, more detailed questionnaire to take home and mail back.

The survey takers will not be in uniform, but they should be easy enough to spot, Fisher said. “Please don’t call the cops on us. We’re legit.”

Visitors also might see staff members posted at trailheads and elsewhere to count people by hand in an effort to double-check the accuracy of the electronic counters and mathematical formulas the park uses to calculate visitation.

Hiking from home

The visitor use study will help shape park operations, programming and, eventually, capital projects.

The effort got underway last year, when park officials began collecting traffic data using counters placed at various locations.

Fisher said they hope to submit all the information they have gathered for analysis by the National Park Service’s Public Use Statistics Office by the end of the summer and get the completed study back later in the year.

Some trends are already apparent.

Fisher said they’re seeing increased use in areas adjacent to new residential developments, such as the Loma Alta Trail on the east side and the Scenic Trail at the northern edge of the park’s Tucson Mountain District.

The larger crowds also have resulted in growing, seasonal congestion in parking lots and on popular roads, especially in the park’s Rincon Mountain District, where the facilities are older and smaller.

The facilities on the west side of the park are newer and better able to handle current visitor traffic, Fisher said.

Several east-side improvements are now in the design stage, including expanded parking at the Broadway and Douglas Spring trailheads.

The Park Service also plans to reduce congestion and improve safety by realigning the main entrance road to separate it from the parking lot for the Rincon Mountain Visitor Center.

There is no timeline for the work, but Fisher said they want to be ready to go with designs in hand the moment federal funding becomes available.

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The first four months of 2021 accounted for nearly two-thirds of Saguaro’s total visitor volume for the year. More than 200,000 recreation visits were recorded last March alone, by far the busiest month the park has ever seen.

The record results came on the heels of a sharp drop in 2020, when visitation fell to 762,226, its lowest level since 2015.

But Fisher wonders if that decline was real or skewed by pandemic disruptions that pushed visitors into other areas.

“I’m not entirely convinced,” she said. “I don’t know how many fewer people we had versus how many fewer people we had to count.”

COVID-19 forced the park’s visitor centers to limit services or close altogether for much of that year, so people who normally would have been counted when they walked through those doors did not show up in the annual total. Fisher said the park’s system for counting visitors simply wasn’t designed for “that challenging time.”

Some adjustments have since been made to the way the park tallies visitation to try to capture more people in more places.

Space available

The bottom line: Saguaro is busier than ever before, but outside of a few bottlenecks, it has not yet been overwhelmed like Grand Canyon, Zion or Arches National Park.

Just ask Norma Inkster.

From 2004 until the pandemic hit in 2020, Inkster led Monday morning hikes at Saguaro through the Southern Arizona Hiking Club. The long-time Tucsonan said her 4-5 mile treks would draw up to 25 participants on some days, but crowding was never a problem.

“You can go a whole hike and not see anyone — even today,” said Inkster, who, at age 86, still hits the trail once a week or so.

She said the key to finding solitude — and ample parking — is to go early and avoid congested areas at busy times, such as weekends or holidays.

Still, Inkster said, she is glad to hear about the park service’s plans to expand the undersized trailhead parking lots at the east ends of Speedway and Broadway.

A bigger worry for her, though, are people who walk their dogs on trails where pets are not allowed, scaring off the native animals.

“That concerns me personally,” Inkster said. “We used to see more wildlife.”

Last year ranked as the fifth-busiest on record for the National Park Service as a whole, with more than 297 million recreation visits at 388 sites managed by the agency.

The all-time record was set in 2016, the service’s centennial year, when visitation approached 331 million.

Park visits nationwide plunged to a 40-year low of 237 million in 2020, amid the worst of the pandemic shutdowns.

Now the virus appears to be fueling the comeback in visitation that began last year at Saguaro and elsewhere, Fisher said.

“I think COVID has people looking for things to do outside,” she said. “It’s great (that) people are finding their public lands. We just want to make sure we’re ready when folks get here.”