Olympic National Park has reported consistently since the 1990s that it receives more than 3 million visits a year — enough visits to secure it a spot on the annual list of the top 10 most-visited national parks.
But a cursory survey of residents who live and work near the 922,651-acre park shows that few fathom having seen anything close to 3 million people crossing into the park in any given year.
That leads to the inevitable question:
How do Olympic National Park officials determine how many visits the park receives every year?
The process, it turns out, isn’t simple.
According to park officials who every month must calculate the number of park visits — both recreational and non-recreational — their method doesn’t constitute exact science.
“We use a complex system that gives us the best [visitor] numbers we can get with the resources we have,” said Park Superintendent Bill Laitner in a recent interview.
Other officials said that while the estimates they produce may not be perfect, they serve to highlight trends in park attendance at different areas of the park.
“I am the first to admit that our system has some flaws,” said Tim Simonds, the park’s chief ranger.
“But we can see increases and decreases in visitation.”
Counting visits, not visitors
Laitner stressed that Olympic National Park — which in 2004 registered 3,073,722 recreational visits — focuses primarily on the number of visits paid to the park and not on the number of people visiting the park.
The difference, he explained, is that one person can be recorded as making several visits to the park in a single day.
That’s a common occurrence, park officials said.
Barb Maynes, park spokeswoman, said officials rely mostly on 16 traffic counters placed around the park to tally the number of visits.
Those traffic counters record each car that travels past a certain point on the road.
“The traffic counters are located at all the entrance avenues into the park,” Maynes said.
