Colorado is home to four national parks in almost every corner of the state. But most adventurers will never make it past the largest and most iconically Colorado: Rocky Mountain National Park in the north-central Rockies.
Last year 4.1 million people went to RMNP. That’s 75% of all National Park visits in Colorado and nearly 4.5% of park visits nationwide.
Then again, RMNP has always been Colorado’s most popular outdoor refuge, home to Moraine Park, Longs Peak and dozens of high-alpine lakes. An estimated 31,000 people came for the grand opening in 1915. Just two years later visits more than tripled. In five years, for the opening year of Fall River Road (now known as Old Fall River Road), there were seven times as many visitors.
Colorado’s oldest park, Mesa Verde, near Cortez in Colorado’s southwestern corner, saw just 80 visitors when it opened in 1908. It didn’t break 1,000 visitors until 1916. No more than 772,000 people have visited the park’s extensive cliff dwellings in a single year, and that was back in 1988. These days annual visits are sitting around 600,000 – a little slower than RMNP in just one month this June.
RMNP hit a tipping point just before the pandemic with a whopping 4.67 million people in 2019.
Visits tumbled by more than a million in 2020, but the park was right back to near-record levels in 2021 with 4.43 million people. This convinced park rangers to introduce a controversial timed-entry system, where you must reserve a RMNP visit – no more showing up whenever you want.
For two years reservations seemed to be working. Visits were down by hundreds of thousands in both 2022 and 2023.
But this year is trending different. Through June RMNP is busier than the past two years, and almost keeping pace with the record season of 2019.