Covid or no, Great Smoky Mountains National Park is a record-setter, and last year was no exception. The park, which sprawls across parts of North Carolina and Tennessee, is consistently the most-visited National Park in the U.S.
The National Park Service says that 2021, with 14.1 million visits, not only broke the 2019 record by 1.5 million but also set new monthly records eight times last winter and spring. In 2020, with the pandemic keeping most people at home, Great Smoky still had over 12 million visitors. Yellowstone, the second-most-visited park usually has around a quarter as many visitors.
Here’s the list of the ten most-visited for last year:
- Great Smoky Mountains NP 12,095,720
- Yellowstone NP 3,806,306
- Zion NP 3,591,254
- Rocky Mountain NP 3,305,199
- Grand Teton NP 3,289,638
- Grand Canyon NP 2,897,098
- Cuyahoga Valley NP 2,755,628
- Acadia NP 2,669,034
- Olympic NP 2,499,177
- Joshua Tree NP 2,399,542
