Mount Rainier visitation by year.

Mount Rainier 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

Mount Rainier's annual recreation visits over the full 1979-2025 dataset trace a long, lumpy plateau rather than a clean growth arc. The dataset begins in 1979 at roughly 1.52 million visits, with the dataset trough at 1.01 million in 1982; the only year in the full 47-year series below 1.05 million and the trace's deepest reading by a wide margin. The 1980s ran in the 1.0-to-1.4 million range with a decade mean near 1.21 million as the park recovered from that early 1980s low. The 1990s pushed visits into the 1.2-to-1.6 million range with a decade mean near 1.39 million, helped by Pacific Northwest population growth and broader Cascades interest. The 2000s actually drifted downward into a 1.0-to-1.4 million band, with the decade mean near 1.21 million, essentially a return to 1980s levels.

The 2010s gradually rebuilt the trace into a 1.3-to-1.5 million band with a decade mean near 1.27 million. Unlike most NPS units, Mount Rainier never participated in the late-2010s outdoor-recreation surge at full magnitude: the short summer access window (Sunrise Road only opens late June through mid-September per NPS) and the constrained subalpine wildflower bloom physically cap demand. 2019 reached 1.50 million, and the 2020 pandemic year fell to 1.16 million driven by NPS's late opening and staged reopening through the summer.

The post-pandemic recovery has been notable. 2021 climbed to 1.67 million, just above the 1990s peak, and the all-time annual record in the full 1979-2025 series was set in 2023 at 1.67 million. 2024 was the first year of the timed-entry vehicle reservation system for the Paradise and Sunrise corridors and visits held at 1.62 million; 2025 came in at 1.64 million, within a percent of the all-time record. The 47-year mean is roughly 1.31 million; 2025 sits about 320,000 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 1982 trough, an uneven multi-decade plateau in the 1.2-to-1.5 million band, and a small 2020s breakout once the timed-entry system began deliberately distributing demand across the short summer window. Year-to-year movement on top of the modern plateau is dominated by Paradise corridor access (timed-entry administration, Sunrise Road opening date, Pacific Northwest wildfire smoke) rather than by changes in underlying demand. For seasonal shape, when within the year these visits actually land, see the per-park month-by-month curve on the best-time-to-visit page.

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.