The Grand Canyon National Park has hit a record number of visitors this year, with six million people visiting in 2016. This is a nine percent increase from last year when 5,520,736 people visited the park.
The park actually kept track of the numbers in live time, so they were able to identify who tipped the number over into the six million range. A family of Johnson’s from Las Vegas did the honor when they visited the park for the first time ever.
The number of visitors to the park has been increasing for a while, but the jumps were much slower at first. It took 23 years for the park to go from welcoming four million to five million visitors, but then only a single year to grow from five million to six million.
The park believes that part of the growth is in thanks to the National Park Service’s centennial celebration, as well as an increase in general marketing that they’ve been doing.
