Visitation steady over years at park

Visitation steady over years at park

Oct. 14, 2000

By Janelle Holden
Journal Staff Writer

Until this year and its disastrous wildfires, visitor rates at Mesa Verde have held fairly steady for the past 10 years.

In 1992, the visitation rates peaked at 742,020 people, but have generally stayed in between 600,000 and 700,000 over the past decade.

In 2000, the Pony and Bircher wildfires forced the park’s closure for nearly three weeks during its peak tourist season – July and August — and now visitation rates are down by close to 30 percent for the first nine months of this year. In total, 349,654 tourists have visited the park in 2000.

Even with the fires, however, this year Mesa Verde National Park was rated by readers of Condé Nast Traveler as one of the top 10 U.S. monuments for the third year in a row. The park was ranked second behind San Simeon Castle in California and ahead of other monuments such as Pearl Harbor Memorial, Mount Rushmore and Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

Chaco Canyon in New Mexico also made the top 10.

Although the park currently directly profits from the proceeds of ticket sales into the park, park officials say they have not used a planned marketing strategy to boost visitation, other than after this year’s fire season. The proceeds from ticket sales are directed to infrastructure projects.

Will Morris, spokesman for the park, said that even in a normal year, the park has never reached carrying capacity. "We are nowhere near the carrying capacity of the (park’s only entrance) road," Morris said.

Complete carrying capacity is determined by parking space and traffic flow.

Morris said before visitors were charged an entrance fee, the park had experienced some parking difficulties, but rarely seems overcrowded now.

Currently, officials are studying the park’s social carrying capacity, or the amount of people tourists are comfortable with before their experience suffers.

By measuring the social carrying capacity through visitor surveys and visitor observations, park managers can identify at what places overcrowding normally occurs, and put a numeric value on social capacity.

Morris said the park is using a computer-generated visitor-experience and resource-protection process, in which Mesa Verde visitors are shown a computer-simulated model of various numbers of people visiting archaeological sites. They then select the image they think is unacceptably crowded.

The park plans to complete the survey project by next summer. From these numbers, park officials will measure maximum and social carrying capacity to determine the optimum visitor rates throughout the park.

Morris said these numbers will help determine whether a visitors center at the front of the park is needed, and whether the park should open sites during the winter.

"Our goal is to set management practices in place that move people to the right places," explained Morris.