Yellowstone National Park set visitation records in May, nearly matched them in June, and remained busy when we arrived this week.
Typically, July and August are the busiest months of the year for the nation's oldest national park. However, visitation data for those months has yet to be released, meaning we won't know if this has been the busiest year in the park's history for some time.
Yet according to various accounts, it's been an extremely busy summer at Yellowstone.
Check out the video to see our trip to Old Faithful
There were lines waiting to get into the park at the west entrance near West Yellowstone, Montana. After we took a right at Madison Junction, we entered the busiest part of the park— the geyser basins leading to Old Faithful.
"We skipped some of them yesterday because there were lines of cars just trying to get in, and you couldn’t really even get into the feature," said Kerry Hills from Tacoma, Washington, who is recreating a trip he took nine years ago with his daughter and her best friend. "We are getting up early, getting out early, then taking breaks in the middle of the day, and we are going out after dinner to see stuff we weren’t able to see early in the day."
Hills returned to check out the Grand Prismatic Spring when it had fewer people in the evening. A trick to enjoying Yellowstone is getting up early to beat the crowds and also steering clear of the major destinations in the middle of the day.
We ended up at Old Faithful at around 1:00 p.m. This area usually has the most people because it has the lodge, places to eat, a visitor center with information, places to hike, and one of the most popular attractions in the park— a geyser that erupts almost like clockwork.
"This is probably the most intense area for crowds," said Nick Wilkes. "It is like that because everybody wants to see the beauty."
Nick Wilkes has been coming to Yellowstone National Park for 20 years with a church group from Indianapolis. Every year, they bring recent high school graduates to experience Yellowstone and the Western U.S.
"We like to get in the backcountry and we like to get off the roads where sometimes crowds dissipate really quickly," said Wilkes. "You can experience the beauty of the park in some really awesome ways."
That's good advice because Yellowstone is huge, and people can find solitude in the less crowded places of the park. Not very many people hike in the backcountry compared to the packed parking lots at the most popular attractions.
If you do go in the backcountry you need to get a permit for an overnight stay, and it's always a good idea to have bear spray, as this is grizzly bear country. Other tips to stay safe include keeping a safe distance from wildlife and staying on the boardwalks in the hydro-thermal areas.
However, even with the crowds and the federal lay-offs, everything went pretty smoothly the day we made a loop in the park. My family members told me all the bathrooms were clean, they counted license plates from 40 different states, and we met a lot of international visitors.
We reached out to officials with Yellowstone National Park for an interview, but they declined.
