Shenandoah tracks. Everyone goes for the fall photos. Even I did.
Pattern makes sense – hottest climate parks in the spring or fall, most of the parks in the summer with the northernmost being August rather than June or July, and some of those known for fall colors in the fall.
I like this visualization it’s neat!
You know what would make this cooler? An inner ring that showed the *minimum* visitation, so you could see how variable each park is. I’m sure attendance at the parks in Alaska and Maine drop to nearly zero in February, while Hawaii Volcanoes is popular year-round, but I bet there are some patterns that might surprise you.
This is an interesting visualization and it’s based on an interesting data set.
It also would be nice to see some indicator of the strength of the seasonality, which is a complaint I have about a lot of visualizations that say when something peaks. Nobody goes to Acadia in winter. Biscayne, on the other hand, did have a July peak in 2024 but in some recent years has peaked in May, and isn’t all that far from being flat over the course of the year. And some parks have two peaks, either spring and fall because the summer is just too hot (e.g. Congaree, the Utah parks) or summer and leaf-peepers (Great Smoky Mountains and Shenandoah have a fall peak and a smaller summer peak; New River Gorge is the other way around).
Maybe I should do it myself instead of complaining that someone on the Internet didn’t do exactly the thing I want.
I wish I could more easily tell the difference between the 1000, 10,000, and the 50000 size dot on sight.
I went to the website to look at the Voyageurs data, trying to see if it was 1000 or 10,000, and to my surprise it was 50,000.
This is super cool though! I’m in MN so this got me legit interested in two new places to see
I went to Big Bend in March. I feel included.
Gateway Arch has absolutely no business being a National Park.
I get why Smoky Mountain National Park is the most-visited National Park in the country (being the largest national park near the East Coast and also frickin gorgeous), but why is it so much more heavily visited than Shenandoah given that Shenandoah is so much closer to the Northeast metroplex? The Smokies had something like 23.0 visitors per acre last year, whereas Shenandoah only had 8.5, even though Shenandoah is 5.5ish hours closer to DC, Philly, New York, etc. by car and is still fairly sizeable.
I recommend the Smokies in spring, when the ephemeral wildflowers are in bloom
My first impulse on reading “visitation” was that this was some kind of UFO conspiracy shit.
Love this font
except don’t know why the creator chose to have lowercase J’s not have any tail on the end. You can see it in the Alaskan Fjords park. the j looks like an extra long i.
Not OP’s fault obviously. Just think it’s a bizarre font design choice. The f’s get a little upper tail, the j’s should get a lower one.
Really a great visualization of the difference between eastern and western United States.
So sad that Crater Lake isn’t one of the biggest circles but it makes sense considering it’s only accessible four months out of the year.
Interesting, but the size scale for the circles doesn’t make sense to me. The smallest circle, 1k, is barely different in size from 100k and then it jumps to 1M in a manner that seems to be proportional to the area of the circle. I realize it is hard to cover 1000 orders of magnitude in scale while still allowing the colors to show, but what is here just seems to be inconsistent.
Maybe just cut things off at 50k and call it “<50k” and then make all of the circles larger scale proportional to their area?
It’s a shame that Yosemite peaks in July. It’s still awe inspiring in the summer, but the spring is next level when all of the falls are roaring.
I didn’t realize that such a high percent of natural parks are in Democratic voting states or swing states. Alaska being the obvious counterexample, but…. the deep south has only a single national park? Goddamn.
Interesting to do so by month. I can guarantee by day or week Hot Springs peaked in April during the 2024 eclipse.
![[OC] When did visitation peak at each National Park in 2024?](https://www.europesays.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/81eel8ti8t4g1-1920x1024.jpeg)
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Source: https://www.nps.gov/subjects/socialscience/visitor-use-statistics-dashboard.htm
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Shenandoah tracks. Everyone goes for the fall photos. Even I did.
Pattern makes sense – hottest climate parks in the spring or fall, most of the parks in the summer with the northernmost being August rather than June or July, and some of those known for fall colors in the fall.
I like this visualization it’s neat!
You know what would make this cooler? An inner ring that showed the *minimum* visitation, so you could see how variable each park is. I’m sure attendance at the parks in Alaska and Maine drop to nearly zero in February, while Hawaii Volcanoes is popular year-round, but I bet there are some patterns that might surprise you.
This is an interesting visualization and it’s based on an interesting data set.
It also would be nice to see some indicator of the strength of the seasonality, which is a complaint I have about a lot of visualizations that say when something peaks. Nobody goes to Acadia in winter. Biscayne, on the other hand, did have a July peak in 2024 but in some recent years has peaked in May, and isn’t all that far from being flat over the course of the year. And some parks have two peaks, either spring and fall because the summer is just too hot (e.g. Congaree, the Utah parks) or summer and leaf-peepers (Great Smoky Mountains and Shenandoah have a fall peak and a smaller summer peak; New River Gorge is the other way around).
Maybe I should do it myself instead of complaining that someone on the Internet didn’t do exactly the thing I want.
I wish I could more easily tell the difference between the 1000, 10,000, and the 50000 size dot on sight.
I went to the website to look at the Voyageurs data, trying to see if it was 1000 or 10,000, and to my surprise it was 50,000.
This is super cool though! I’m in MN so this got me legit interested in two new places to see
I went to Big Bend in March. I feel included.
Gateway Arch has absolutely no business being a National Park.
I get why Smoky Mountain National Park is the most-visited National Park in the country (being the largest national park near the East Coast and also frickin gorgeous), but why is it so much more heavily visited than Shenandoah given that Shenandoah is so much closer to the Northeast metroplex? The Smokies had something like 23.0 visitors per acre last year, whereas Shenandoah only had 8.5, even though Shenandoah is 5.5ish hours closer to DC, Philly, New York, etc. by car and is still fairly sizeable.
I recommend the Smokies in spring, when the ephemeral wildflowers are in bloom
My first impulse on reading “visitation” was that this was some kind of UFO conspiracy shit.
Love this font
except don’t know why the creator chose to have lowercase J’s not have any tail on the end. You can see it in the Alaskan Fjords park. the j looks like an extra long i.
Not OP’s fault obviously. Just think it’s a bizarre font design choice. The f’s get a little upper tail, the j’s should get a lower one.
Really a great visualization of the difference between eastern and western United States.
So sad that Crater Lake isn’t one of the biggest circles but it makes sense considering it’s only accessible four months out of the year.
Interesting, but the size scale for the circles doesn’t make sense to me. The smallest circle, 1k, is barely different in size from 100k and then it jumps to 1M in a manner that seems to be proportional to the area of the circle. I realize it is hard to cover 1000 orders of magnitude in scale while still allowing the colors to show, but what is here just seems to be inconsistent.
Maybe just cut things off at 50k and call it “<50k” and then make all of the circles larger scale proportional to their area?
It’s a shame that Yosemite peaks in July. It’s still awe inspiring in the summer, but the spring is next level when all of the falls are roaring.
I didn’t realize that such a high percent of natural parks are in Democratic voting states or swing states. Alaska being the obvious counterexample, but…. the deep south has only a single national park? Goddamn.
Interesting to do so by month. I can guarantee by day or week Hot Springs peaked in April during the 2024 eclipse.
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