Very early in the year, I was talking to a senior park ranger in Yosemite National Park regarding a potential Roaming Boomers visit.

His polite, but very quick answer was, “Dave, even if you were the New York Times Travel Editor, we are so busy,  we simply couldn’t accommodate you.”

He went on to say that the NPR series on National Parks has stirred a renewed interest in the parks, and their reservations are WAY up.

This is also obviously the same in Yellowstone National Park as they have just set an all-time visitation record for the month of June:

“Nearly 700,000 visitors came to Yellowstone National Park during June. It marks the second record June in a row, and the third record June out of the last four years. Visitor numbers this June are 100,000 higher than those recorded in June 2008.

Visitor numbers were up at all four entrances when compared to year-ago levels, with double-digit increases reported through the East and Northeast Entrances.

The West Entrance remains the park’s busiest, with over 280,000 visitors recorded this June, compared to just over 261,000 a year ago.

Visitation to the park for the first six months of the year is over the one million mark, up 5.3 percent over the same period a year ago.

July is typically the park’s peak visitation month, followed by August, June, September, and May.

Yellowstone hosted a record number of visitors in 2009. Nearly 3.3 million people visited the world’s first national park last year, up 7.5% from 2008 and up 4.6% from the previous record of 3.15 million visitors set in 2007.”

It is very clear that The Roaming Boomers will have to do their visiting in the less busy shoulder seasons, and we are most happy to see our National Parks so busy.

Note:  photograph of Yellowstone’s Castle Geyser is from the Yellowstone National Park’s website.