Crowds at the Laurel Falls Trail prompted park managers to set a time limit for the trailhead parking area/NPS file
How many visitors are too many at Great Smoky Mountains National Park? Last year the park counted 14.1 million visitors, or more than 2 million than in 2020.
The park has increasingly become a year-round destination with eight monthly visitation records set during winter and spring months in 2021, a park release said.
“In the last decade, park visitation has increased by 57 percent,” said acting Superintendent Alan Sumeriski. “While increasing visitation presents complex challenges, we are honored to care for a park that is special to so many people. We remain committed to developing innovative solutions to provide the necessary support for visitor services and resource protection.”
Roads, trails, frontcountry campgrounds, and backcountry campgrounds were all busier than normal in 2021. Frontcountry camping increased 40 percent, while backcountry camping increased 20 percent. The park continues to experience its highest visitation in the summer and fall with peaks in July and October.
However, visitation levels in the winter and spring months are rapidly increasing. In 2021, the park set individual monthly visitation records in January through June, November, and December. During the winter months, December through February, the park had 600,000 more visits than the ten-year average for this time period. During the spring months, March through May, the park had 1.2 million more visits than the ten-year average for this time period.
Operational costs associated with serving more visitors and protecting resources continue to rise. Annual, year-round needs present significant funding and staffing challenges. To help meet critical needs this year, the Friends of the Smokies and Great Smoky Mountains Association are providing more than $4 million in aid. The park is also slated to receive project-specific, short-term funds to help chip away at the maintenance backlog in campgrounds, wastewater systems, and along roads and trails. Construction timelines and project details for significant rehabilitation work are expected to be announced over the next few weeks for several projects.
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I visited the park this summer and can certainly attest to the large numbers of visitors. This is one of the reasons why we need to expand Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
Surrounding the park in North Carolina and Tennessee are extensive national forest lands that also have remarkable carbon storage capacity, biodiversity, and recreational values. However, a National Academy of Sciences report found that these lands are inadequately protected from logging and other extractive uses that fragment and degrade forest ecosystems. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1418034112
The park could be expanded from 521,000 acres to 2 million acres, incorporating existing public lands from the Cherokee, Nantahala, and Pisgah national forests. The would ensure their strong and permanent protection and connecting the existing park to wilderness areas and other core wildlands in the region. The addition of these lands would also help to relieve some of the intense visitor pressure by spreading visitor use over a much wider area.
We went in early October and really had to plan carefully on what to visit when. On a morning with steady rain, Laura Falls parking lot was full by 8:30 am and a small crowd at the falls by 9:00 am. Cades Cove loop took 3 hours just for the 11 miles. The Roaring Motor Nature Trail took 2+ hours to go the 5 miles at 9am.
The park needs to disperse the crowd more with additional "main roads" that lead to more remote parts of the park so the people have somewhere to go besides the two main roads in the park.