Park Service breaks visitation record

The National Park Service set a new record for visitation to its facilities last year, breaking the previous 27-year-old record.

Parks saw 292.8 million recreational visits in 2014, a 7 percent increase over 2013 and 5.6 million more than the old record set in 1987, the agency said Tuesday.

{mosads}Park Service Director Jonathan Jarvis said the increased visits mean an economic boost to the communities surrounding parks, including the hundreds of thousands of jobs that parks support.

“With this record visitation we should see something on the order of $15 billion in visitor spending, 250,000 or more jobs and a $28 billion effect on the U.S. economy when our annual economics of national parks report comes out in April,” Jarvis said in a statement.

The Golden Gate National Recreation Area, which includes many urban parks in the San Francisco Bay area, was the most visited Park Service unit in 2014, with 15 million visits.

The most visited area that is considered a park by the agency was the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, with 10 million visits.

Several individual parks saw new record visitation figures last year, including the Joshua Tree, Rocky Mountain, Grand Teton and Glacier national parks, the agency said.