YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK — Yellowstone National Park (YNP) announced Tuesday that it saw 4,501,382 recreation visits in 2023, making it the park’s second busiest year in its visitation records (which began in 1904).
As is the case for neighboring Grand Teton National Park, 2021 remains Yellowstone’s busiest year on record, when the park hosted 4,860,242 recreation visits.
YNP’s 4.5 million visits in 2023 signifies a 37% increase over 2022’s 3,290,242 visits, when a historic flood closed the park for part of June.
Also noteworthy: More than half of visits in both 2021 and 2023 occurred in June, July and August, according to the park. But early fall months are becoming ever more popular.
According to the National Park Service’s statistics portal, the first time YNP topped one million annual recreation visits was 1948. It crossed the two million annual recreation visits threshold in 1965, and topped three million for the first time in 1992. 2015 was the first time visitation exceeded four million.
Also included in the announcement were visitation numbers for the entire National Park Service, which reported 325.5 million recreation visits last year across 400 national park units, an increase of 13 million visits (or 4%) over 2022.
