West dominates most-visited U.S.national parks list

Yellowstone National Park

It should come as no surprise that national parks in the western states draw more visitors than other national parks in the United States. What is surprising is that Arizona's Grand Canyon National Park is no longer the most visited park in the nation.

Grand Canyon drew 5.5 million visitors in 2015, but this figure was almost doubled by Great Smoky Mountains National Park with 10.7 million visitors, according to statistics recently released  by the National Park Service.

Grand Canyon topped five million visitors for the first time last year. It was one of 57 parks to set attendance records, the park service said. The park service is expecting the number of visitors to increase substantially this year as 2016 is the 100th anniversary of the founding of the National Park Service.

Western parks on the top 10 parks attracting the most visitors last year include:

• No. 2L Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona, 5.5 million.
• No. 3: Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado, 4.15 million visitors.
• No. 4: Yosemite National Park, California, 4.1 million visitors.
• No. 5: Yellowstone National Park, Montana and Wyoming, 4.1 million visitors.
• No. 6: Zion National Park, Utah, 3.6 million people.
• No. 7: Olympic National Park, Washington State, 3.3 million visitors.
• No. 8: Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming, 3.1 million visitors.
• No. 10: Glacier National Park, Montana,  2,4 million visitors.

Maine's Acadia National Park came in at No. 9 with 2.8 million visitors.

The west didn't fare as well when all sites, including recreation areas and historic monuments, are considered. These sites number 410 compared to 59 national parks.

Grand Canyon, which ranked second on the most-visited national park list, dropped to 10th on the most visited of all NPS sites. Blue Ridge Parkway topped the list with 15 million visitors, while California's Golden Gate National Recreational Area was second with 14.9 million visitors. Lake Mead National Recreation Area was No. 5 with 7.3 million visitors.

Totally awesome video!

If you love wildlike, you'll love this short video clip about wildlife at Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks, and the National Elk Refuge at Jackson Hole, Wyoming. It was the grand prize winner at the International Wildlife Film Festival in Missoula, Montana. After you've watched it, you'll agree!

Enjoy the video!

Riding through Yellowstone on a motor scooter

When we went to Yellowstone National Park last September, we hauled our motor scooters along and rode them in America's best-loved park. People ride motorcycles in the park, so why not scooters.

I'd been to Yellowstone many times before, but this was a first on a scooter.  It won't be the last time, however. Riding through the park was an incredible experience and provided me with a whole different perspective on Yellowstone. It feels like you are so much closer to nature, and, indeed, you are. You are especially much closer to the animals, such as buffalo. While the park service requires you to be 75 to 300 feet away from animals, depending on the type, even in cars, this isn't always possible, especially where buffalo are concerned. Bison rule the roads!

I was nervous whenever I road around buffalo on the road. After all, I didn't have a car to protect me, though I am not sure how much good that would have done me if a big shaggy beast decided he didn't like my car. At visitor centers, you can see videos of buffalo tossing people around like throw pillows and elk attacking cars. My scooter is a Yamaha 125, capable of speeds of 60 miles an hour, so I was confident I could outrun a buffalo if I didn't panic and the road was flat. Luckily, I didn't have to do this.

The park is divided into two loops, and we took a day to ride each one. What I call the north loop was the hardest because there are so many hills to climb, which I usually went up between 20 and 30 miles per hour. The maximum speed limit in the park is 45 mph, and I had no trouble doing that when it was flat. Still, on the hills, the only vehicles I passed were bicyclists, and, boy, was I glad I was on a scooter!

We took a few days off between riding the loops, and did shorter runs on the other days, returning to places we wanted to spend more time at or had skipped on the long ride because they were on the last leg and we were pretty tired.

Touring the park this way was such an incredible experience, I wrote a short book about it, Yellowstone on a motor scooter. The book is available through the Amazon Kindle store in text-only. If you like pictures and maps with your books, surf on over to Guidegecko for a PDF version. I'm told PDF books also work on Kindle, through the pictures aren't in color.

If you have a scooter or motorcycle, where's your favorite place to ride?

In search of grizzlies

Grizzlies at the Discovery Center



We went to Yellowstone National Park at the wrong time of the year to see grizzlies. The park service tells me they're more easily seen in early spring or late fall when they're at lower elevations.

In all my trips to Yellowstone I've only seen bears twice. The first time was on my first trip back when I was eight years old. I came out of a restroom at Fishing Bridge to see a black bear running by; I immediately went back into the bathroom. The second time was on a trip in the mid 1980s when I had to use binoculars to watch a grizzly running up a distant hill.

But this time I figured out a way to see grizzly bears: Visit the Grizzly and Wolf Discovery Center at West Yellowstone. The center had six bears and eight wolves in residence the day we were there. The center has a marvelous exhibit on bears which tells everything you wanted to know about bears but were afraid to ask. You can read an article I wrote about the center here.

After touring the center, we headed off to the Yellowstone movie at the IMAX theatre nearby. There were a couple of scenes with a six-story high grizzly growling at you. Now that was frightening! I much preferred the real-life grizzlies which look fat and sassy and live behind high wire fences at the center.

The fine print

The Federal Trade Commission requires that I tell you that our visits to the center and IMAX were complimentary. Even if they hadn't been, I still would have visited them and wrote the same thing. These were two cool experiences.

Camping at Yellowstone

An elk  passes by our scooters.

We recently returned from a 10-day camping trip to Yellowstone National Park in which we spent six nights inside the park. We stayed three nights at Mammoth Hot Springs campground, where we had elk trooping through our campsite almost every night, then moved down to Madison campground for another three nights. No elk, but RVs were parked so close together, an elk couldn't possibly squeeze between them.



Although I've been to Yellowstone previously, this was by far the best visit. Probably because we hauled our motor scooters over there, and rode daily. While we were at Mammoth, we rode the north loop one day. It was uphill all the way to Canyon, and our scooters just gulped up the gas at $3.99 a gallon.



Plans for riding in the park were almost derailed the day we moved down to Madison. We checked into our campsite, and decided to take an afternoon ride down to Old Faithful, even though we would be stopping there the day we rode the park's south loop. About halfway there, I pulled over to let some cars go by -- I was doing the 45 mph speed limit, but it apparently wasn't fast enough for them.  Just as I was slowing down at the pull-out, the rear tire went flat. I thought for sure my scooter riding was done in the park.



My husband rode back to camp, and brought the van and motorcycle trailer back to rescue us. We went into West Yellowstone where we had the good fortune to be referred to Centennial Auto Repair. They located a tube for the tire in a town 40 miles away, and made a special trip there to get it for me. We went back to camp and my husband took the wheel off my scooter. We dropped it off at Centennial the next morning, then took off for the appointments I had for my writing assignments about Yellowstone. We picked up the tire on our way out of town, after being pleasantly surprised at the very reasonable bill Centennial presented for everything they did for us. So many times, businesses will try to gouge tourists in difficulty because they know they'll never see them again. If you have car problems while you're visiting Yellowstone, I would definitely recommend taking them to Centennial.



While we were in the park, we say many, many motorcycles on the roads. I found it very surprising no motorcycle shops were to be found in West Yellowstone.  I can't be the only rider who had problems. (I also had a couple of mechanical problems, but my husband, a retired motorcycle mechanic, was able to handle them.