How many visitors can Yellowstone National Park handle during the summer months?/Kurt Repanshek

One million visitors.

That seems like a lot for an entire year, and definitely a lot in one month for Yellowstone National Park, which came within 19,000-odd visitors of reaching 1 million visitors during July.

A little more than halfway through 2015, the National Park System seems to be heading to surpass last year's record-setting visitation of not quite 293 million visitors.

Yellowstone, after seeing 980,702 visitors in July, is riding a 17 percent increase in traffic over last year. Rocky Mountain National Park is up 20 percent, Zion National Park is up 17 percent, Acadia National Park is up 9 percent, and Yosemite National Park is up 16.50 percent, just to look at how some parks are doing this year.

While it's great to see folks heading out to the national parks, crowds are not always what folks want to contend with on their vacations, and the resources can take a pounding, too.

"As a former park ranger, I would advise visitors who want to avoid the large crowds is go on the off-season," stated one comment on the Traveler. "Stay away on free days if possible; those are packed with visitors. I went last fall to Rocky Mountain and yikes the traffic was bad; hard to enjoy yourself when you are in a traffic jam. So, no more free days for me as much as like to save money. It's just not worth it."

At Yellowstone, officials said that through the first seven months of the year recreational visits totaled 2,279,557. That's up 17 percent over last year, and 13 percent over the previous record year in 2010, they said.

"Each of the park’s five entrances showed increased visits for the month of July, with the North and West entrances both continuing to record the largest increases over July of last year," a park release stated.

While there have been concerns in recent years that national park visitation was flat, if not declining, and more recently that 2014's record number was disappointing when interpreted on a per-capita basis, today's crowds nevertheless bring to mind the cries that we're "loving the national parks to death."

While some say that phrase dates to the 1970s, and others recall hearing it in the 1960s, the late Bernard DeVoto and Wallace Stegner raised the alarm in the 1950s, when there were 180 units in the park system (vs. 408 today), annual visitation was  46.2 million, and the Park Service's budget was $33.16 million.

"Do what you can about America's slop-happy habit of defacing signs, tearing up shrubs and wild flowers and throwing candy wrappers, bottles and beer cans in creeks and springs and geysers. Be patient when tourists bawl you out for something 'because I pay taxes for this,'" wrote Stegner, who is praised for calling the parks "America's Best Idea," in a column for Sports Illustrated. "Do it all on a pitifully inadequate budget, with collapsing equipment and an overworked and undermanned staff and smile. The picture is gruesome, but it is neither sensational nor exaggerated."

For his part, DeVoto, in a column not-so-subtly titled Let's Close the National Parks that appeared in Harper's Magazine, also lamented the plight of the park ranger. 

"Guard against fire, clean up after litterbugs. Protect and restore the wildlife, even wolves and mountain lions, in order to keep the balance of nature, but do it in a show window where millions can thrill to see it," he wrote. "Offer high-grade adult education to all who ask for it and many who don't. Rescue climbers trapped or injured on the cliffs, tourists wounded by the bears they have been (against the rules) feeding."

How busy, visitor-wise, were the parks in 1953? And how much growth in visitors have they seen?

According to the National Park Service statisticians:

* Acadia National Park drew 555,195 visitors in 1953, and 2,563,129 last year;

* Bryce Canyon National Park went from 242,820 in 1953, to 1,435,741 last year;

* Capitol Reef National Park, which saw just 9,991 in 1953, welcomed 786,514 visitors last year;

* Yellowstone? It was busy in 1953, with 1,326,858 visitors, a little more than a third of last year's 3,513,484, and;

* Yosemite's visitation went from 973,971 in 1953 to 3,882,642 last year. 

That, understandably, is just a snapshot of park visitation. But if Stegner and DeVoto were so worried about the parks when visitation was much lower, as were the number of units in the park system, how is the system faring under record-breaking numbers today? And what will next year, the 100th birthday of the National Park Service, bring in terms of visitation?

There certainly are enough units in today's park system to handle the crowds.

The trick, of course, is spreading out the crowds, both across the entire system, and throughout the year. Let's hope the National Park Service's Find Your Park campaign can accomplish that.