The National Park Service (NPS) oversees 423 national parks, monuments, historic sites, and other areas. Hundreds of millions of people take in the parks every year, but the pandemic caused a 28% decrease in visits between 2019 and 2020.
There were 327.5 million recreational visits within the National Park System in 2019, about one per every US resident. There were 237 million in 2020, dropping the annual visitation rate to the lowest levels since the 1960s.
