The latest numbers from the National Park Service confirm what many locals already know: Southern Utah’s parks attracted big crowds in 2023.
Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, which covers parts of Utah and Arizona, led the pack. It set a new record with 5,206,934 visitors, buoyed by rising water levels at Lake Powell. That more than doubled its annual total from a decade ago and made it Utah’s most visited site last year.
Signs of the boom extended far beyond long lines at the park’s entrance gate, said Judy Franz, executive director of the Page-Lake Powell Chamber of Commerce and the local visitor center.
“The grocery stores were packed. The restaurants were packed. Traffic was much heavier.”
In a regional economy that relies heavily on tourism dollars, she said, the crowds were a welcome relief. That’s especially true for businesses that faced tough times in recent years with the pandemic and record-low water levels at Lake Powell.
Other southern Utah parks came close to breaking records, too.
Zion had its third-highest year ever with 4,623,238 guests, making it the third most visited National Park in the country behind only the Great Smoky Mountains and the Grand Canyon. Canyonlands National Park welcomed 800,322 visitors for its second-highest total on record.
Some of the parks have begun to take steps to adapt to this new reality.
Arches National Park launched a timed entry reservation system in 2022. It’s scheduled to restart on April 1 and run through the end of October, with reservations opening up three months in advance.
Zion hasn’t gone as far as timed entry, but the park did begin requiring advance reservations for one of its most popular hiking trails, Angel’s Landing, in 2022 in response to visitor concerns about crowding.
“Today, we're operating a system where we've issued hundreds of thousands of permits for visitors to go and enjoy that hike, and we're accommodating about 80% of the use that we measured when we did trail studies before we implemented the permit program,” Zion Public Affairs Specialist Jonathan Shafer said.
The NPS data also shows the tourism season at southern Utah’s parks is getting longer, stretching out over many months rather than just seeing a spike in the summer. Glen Canyon had considerably more visitors in March, April and September of 2023 than in those months of the previous four years. Utah’s Mighty 5 parks had more combined visitors in October 2023 than any of the past four Octobers.
Franz has seen that change first-hand in the nearly two decades she’s lived in the Lake Powell area, particularly with more international tourists coming at all times of year.
“There used to be a time where from, say, October to March, it was dead as a doornail in this town. We don't have that anymore.”
Local leaders are working to adapt, she said, with plans for a new roundabout to ease traffic at a dangerous intersection and a streetscape redesign initiative to make Lake Powell Boulevard more pedestrian friendly.
Residents have had to adjust, too.
“They don't grocery shop during the day. They're going early in the morning, like I do,” Franz said. “For the locals that like to be out on the lake, they don't go on the weekends at all.”
Despite these challenges, Franz believes the changes have been good for the community. She’s hopeful this season will be even bigger than last year’s, with decent snowpack possibly adding to the ample runoff that Lake Powell enjoyed last winter.
That illustrates the trade-off that comes with being a popular destination.
Lisa Michele Church, a community historian who recently spoke on tourism’s impact in southwest Utah as part of a Smithsonian Institute series in St. George, said the parks have allowed the region to reinvent itself — but at a cost.
“It's a blessing and a curse for those communities because they can't possibly serve all those people if they decided to move here. But if they want to just come here and spend their money, then there's some benefits to it.”
Eventually the region’s tourism growth will reach its limit, she said — whether that’s long lines at park entrances, a strained water supply or something else — so it’s important for leaders to plan to diversify their economies now.
Even for the natural wonders that made this region an outdoor recreation mecca, Church said, the growth can’t keep rising on an endless curve.
“You can love it to death. … You have to really think about making sure you protect the very thing that was saving you, and make the quality of the experience for the tourists still valuable. … Don't kill the golden goose.”
