Thanks to social media, North Cascades National Park’s no longer our well-kept secret
The good news — at least for those of us who live in Northwest Washington — is our closest National Park is a pretty well-kept secret.
The bad news is that those who are visiting aren’t doing a very good job keeping it a secret.
Despite drawing the sixth-smallest number of visitors among the 62 U.S. National Parks in 2018, North Cascades National Park recently was crowned the most Instagrammable National Park in the system by ground and air travel booking website Wanderu.com.
“Those that go to these sacred natural spaces commemorate their visits with passport stamps, fabric patches, pins, magnets — and, of course, Instagram posts,” Wanderu wrote in its report. “Whether it’s a windy summit snap or an #outofoffice humble-brag, nothing brightens up your IG feed like a hit of natural beauty.”
The U.S. Parks Service reports it has welcomed more than 300 million visitors annually since 2015, including 327,516,619 last year, up from 318,211,833 in 2018.
But North Cascades National Park’s visitation was just a small part of those numbers, drawing 30,085 people in 2018 and 38,208 last year.
By comparison, the National Parks Service reported that in 2019 the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee drew 12.5 million visitors (No. 1), Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona drew 5.97 million (No. 2), Yosemite National park in California drew 4.5 million (No. 5), Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming and Montana drew 4 million (No. 6) and Olympic National Park in Washington drew 3.2 million (No. 9).
The Wanderu rankings used 2018 numbers, when North Cascades’ 30,085 visitors bettered only Alaska’s Gates of the Arctic National Park (9,591 visitors), Kobuk Valley National Park (14,937) and Lake Clark National Park (14,479); Michigan’s Isle Royale National Park (25,798); and the National Park of the American Samoa (28,626).
But what North Cascades lacked in visitors, it more than made up for on social media, Wanderu found by tallying the number of times each National Park was included in a hashtag in Instagram posts.
North Cascades was hashtagged in 229,075 Instagram posts — 27th overall behind top-ranked Yosemite’s more than 4.5 million posts. Grand Canyon was second with 4.1 million posts.
But Wanderu went one step further, dividing each park’s Instagram posts by the number of visitors it welcomed in 2018 to determine the most Instagrammable, and that’s where North Cascades shined.
Visitors to North Cascades National Park averaged 7.61 Instagram posts — more than three times better than No. 2 Redwood National Park (2.34), which was included in 1,131,495 posts but drew 482,546 visitors.
In describing what North Cascades visitors are posting about, Wanderu said, “This secluded, rugged landscape of glaciers and alpine lakes provides refuge for other animals you’d be hard-pressed to find elsewhere in the US: wolverines, wolves, lynx, moose — the list goes on.”
This story was originally published March 2, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
