Your Questions Answered 2
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TRANSCRIPT:
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Kate: In this episode, we're exploring all of the different questions visitors ask us here at Grand Canyon National Park.
Brendan: My name is Brendan Oates.
Kate: My name is Kate Hensel.
Brendan: And we have a special guest, Jeremy.
Jeremy: Jeremy Childs here from Interp on the Rim.
Brendan: Yeah. Good to talk to you here, we don't really get to talk to people on the rim that often, so it's good to have you! And we were thinking about it, I think out of all three of us, you've probably answered the most questions if you counted them all up.
Jeremy: Per capita?
Brendan: Yeah, Per Capita.
Jeremy: Yeah- all those shifts working at the VC. Definitely. Yeah, I miss those days, honestly. But yeah, some days we'd have a line out the door all day long from open to close, and so not unusual to do 5 or 6 hundred visitors a day.
Brendan: Wow. And how many questions do you think that would add up to?
Jeremy: Three or four different questions.
*laughing*
Jeremy: Yeah, no it's... It's, you know, first time here, what do we do? And then you go through your spiel. The second most question is where's the glass walkway thing? And then of course, where's the restrooms? Big one too. But literally, I mean. It's whenever someone asks a really good question like I saw this flower and they describe it to you and you're like, thank you. You're my favorite visitor of the day. Because they ask something unique, and it gives you an opportunity to think a little bit. And to expand your repertoire, rather than just your normal spiel like you know the shuttles are free, blah blah blah...
Brendan: Well, Jeremy, we have a bunch of different questions we pulled from a bunch of different sources, usually not as much asking where the bathrooms are, but more of an opinion. And you've probably heard a few of these before. So - Dive right in, Kate?
Kate: Yeah, So the first question is where is the best place to see sunset?
Jeremy: So, this is interesting because we really wanted to get to the bottom of this and so we had Rangers go out to every of the most popular spots; down the Hermit Rd. Down desert view drive, Mather Point, Yavapai Point here in the village, and we had kind of a bracket style, you know, final four type of thing, Sweet 16, where every couple of days. We would put up a new spot and the photograph and then the public, via Facebook or Twitter, would get to vote on which spot was their favorite. And our typical answer over the last few years has been Hopi point. It's the most popular by far, not unusual to get 4 or 5 hundred people out there on a good summer day. But we were thinking maybe there's something else, you know? And so, we use some North Rim spots, Desert view, you know, all over the place. And after all of that. The one that came in first was Hopi point. So, we gave them sixteen options over the course of two weeks, and the public voted, and they still chose Hopi point. So, we can at least say everyone's going to have their own. Obviously, I have my own. It's not Hopi Point, but I'm not going to share my own, because of the -- one of the reasons I love it is because it is secluded. And that's the great thing! You can find those near Hopi Point. You just walk along the rim trail in either direction for 5 minutes and all of the sudden, you're by yourself. And that's the beauty of it. It's really nice. But there's going to be lots of differences, but we tell people now that it has been voted on and decided by the public that Hopi Point is the crowd favorite at least.
Brendan: Yeah, I remember that was, when that was decided once and for all. And but were you part of that bracket? That final Four?
Jeremy: I didn't take any of the photographs, but I was voting for sure, but no, they we had a large amount of seasonals that were here. They arrived in March and literally we had two days of working the visitor center before we shut things down.
Brendan: Oh, man.
Jeremy: They were scrambling for things to do, for projects to do, and that was one of them that they came up with. I thought it was pretty cool.
Brendan: So, the next question is another one you've heard before is how many people visit Grand Canyon per year? I think it depends on the year, especially now...
Jeremy: We had our busiest year ever just two years ago, which was I think 6.38 million visitors. It's a huge number of people. Honestly, that was about what we expected. 2016, we thought it was going to be a big year and it was not quite as big because of the Centennial for the National Parks Service, and then the 2018-2019 season we thought because of our Centennial as a National Park, but it actually ended up going down just slightly from the 6.38 in that year. So, 6.38 million is the most that this park has had, and it has been hovering around 6,000,000 for about a decade now.
Brendan: And would you say we are the most visited National Park? I know, I know that's a tricky question.
Jeremy: So that that, yeah, that depends on who you ask. So, there's a lot of different ways you can look at this. So, Great Smoky Mountain National Park, they get close to 11,000,000 visitors a year. That said, they have a highway that goes through the middle of the park, and it is oftentimes the only way to get from Tennessee to North Carolina and back, and they count every single car that drives down that as like 2.3 visitors or something in their algorithm. So that's how they get to their 11,000,000 visitors per year. Now, how many of those people actually getting out of their vehicles and enjoying the resource? Not sure about that. So Great Smoky Mountain National Park can say they're the most visited National Park. There's also Golden Gate National Park in San Francisco, but they count every single concert, every single boat that comes up to a pier, every single... You know, there's... there's a lot of different ways to look at this, but if you look at people on the ground, boots on the ground, visitors that are enjoying the park in a meaningful and interpretive way, then I would say the Grand Canyon. It's typically about 2 million visitors more than its closest competitor, Yellowstone, Yosemite, Zion. Those places which average between 4 and 4 and a half million visitors a year.
Brendan: So yeah, and I think we see a very specific view, because you're on the South Rim, but in the Canyon, I think we've had also record numbers the last couple of years. I think the saying goes 1% out of all the Grand Canyon visitors visit the Canyon, but we've had a lot of Rim to Rim or Rim to Rim to Rim runners come the last few days.
Kate: Yeah. And we've also been seeing, as the years progress, that our Rim to Rim or Rim to Rim to Rim season are getting longer and longer, so we're seeing more people that way too. In talking about different ways of getting around the Canyon, can I bike at Grand Canyon?
Jeremy: Absolutely. It's a very bikeable park. There's basically about... I'm going to say 8 miles ish on the Hermit Road and that's nice when it's closed to traffic, because it's only accessible via the buses or walking or biking. For the majority of the year, from March 1st to the end of November, it's shuttle bus only on that road. And that means that you can bike it and it's so wonderful. They do ask that you pull off the road if a shuttle bus is coming, but they only come by every 15 or 20 minutes. So, you basically have it all to yourself. It's a really nice, paved road. You're right on the edge of the Canyon. There's lots of opportunities to stop along the way and enjoy the views. Uh, But it's safe. It's family fun. Uh, we do have the Bright Angel bicycle shop here in the park and they do a lot of tours where they will take you out in a van and they have guides that can tell you that some of the history about what you're looking at, but it it's a, it's a historic road that dates back to the early 20th century and it's since been improved several times. Wonderful ride. There's also a Greenway system that runs throughout the park. So, if you wanted to, you could bike just about the entire village area without ever having to touch a road. And that's important to us because the drivers here, they have vacation brain, they're oftentimes distracted by animals and pretty views. And so, they're not looking at the bicycles that might be on the road with them. So, we've offered a wonderful alternative to riding on the roads with all the greenways that we have here. And you received the map at the front entrance station and all the green dotted lines, those are bicycle friendly greenways. All the black dotted lines, those are pedestrian only, the solid black lines are roads, so we encourage you to take the greenways or one of the roads that are close to personal vehicles.
Kate: Yeah, switching over to the other Rim, so over on the North Rim here you can bike the Bridle Path, which takes you from the Backcountry Office area down to the visitor center. So that's a great way, if the parking lots are really full, and you can park somewhere else and then get down to the rim views near the visitor center that way. And we also have the Arizona Trail that comes through Grand Canyon, so you can bike up to the rim on the Arizona Trail. But once you get to the Canyon edge, you have to carry your bike across the Canyon, and you just told me, Brendan, that you saw some people carrying their bikes this past week.
Brendan: Yeah. No, I actually saw a guy about an hour ag
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