Grand Teton visitation by year.

Grand Teton by the year.

Each row is the park's total recreation visits for that calendar year, drawn from the official NPS Visitor Use Statistics Data Package, 2025 (Statistic = TRV, summed from monthly to annual). The full 1979-2025 history is shown — 47 years. Bar widths are proportional to the all-time peak; the orange bar marks the peak year and the teal bar marks the lowest year in the full window.

What the trend says

Grand Teton's annual recreation visits over the full 1979-2025 dataset trace a less monotonic arc than its neighbors. The dataset begins in 1979 at roughly 2.45 million, but the early 1980s actually fell — the dataset low is 1.23 million in 1988, a stretch when several years ran in the 1.3-to-1.5 million range. That 1980s trough is the deepest in the full series and is not directly explained by a single event; it reflects a broader pre-1990s baseline that recovered slowly. The 1990s ran in the 2.5-to-2.9 million range with a decade mean near 2.66 million.

The 2000s held in the 2.5-to-2.8 million band, and the 2010s pushed the park into a new plateau: visits crossed 3.0 million in 2014 and reached 3.49 million in 2018, with a 2010s decade mean near 3.20 million. The pandemic year 2020 dipped only modestly to 3.29 million — Grand Teton's drive-up traffic from Salt Lake City, Denver, and the regional western states proved unusually pandemic-resilient because the park has no large indoor visitor infrastructure that needed to close. The all-time peak in the full 1979-2025 series is 3.89 million in 2021, the first full reopening summer.

The 2022 trace shows the sharpest single-year disruption in the dataset: visits fell to 2.81 million — a 1.08-million drop from the 2021 peak — driven by spillover from the June 2022 Yellowstone flood, which closed Yellowstone's northern loop and disrupted the regional travel patterns that funnel visitors between the two parks. Recovery has been steady: 3.42 million in 2023, 3.63 million in 2024, and 3.80 million in 2025 — the second-highest reading in the dataset and within 2.2% of the 2021 record. The 47-year mean is roughly 2.59 million; 2025 sits about 1.21 million visits above that long-term mean and the park is running near its operational ceiling. Read across the full window, the structural story is the deep 1980s trough, a long 1990s-to-2000s recovery, a 2010s climb into a 3-million plateau, and a post-pandemic consolidation just under the 2021 record. Year-to-year movement since 2020 has been driven primarily by adjacent-park access disruptions (the Yellowstone flood) rather than by changes in underlying demand.

Methodology

Annual recreation visits come from the official NPS Visitor Use Statistics Data Package, 2025 on NPS IRMA Stats. The statistic shown is Recreation Visits — the NPS visitor-count category that excludes Tent Campers, Backcountry Campers, and Recreation Visit Hours. Annual totals are computed by summing the twelve monthly TRV (Total Recreation Visits) values for each year. The window displayed here is the full 1979-2025 history available in the NPS dataset. Independent site, not affiliated with the National Park Service.