The three parks, August 2026
The three national parks within a few hours of Seattle drew 881,708 recreation visits in August 2026: 397,493 at Mount Rainier, 528,764 at Olympic and 4,991 at North Cascades.
Three charts, not three lines. Olympic runs to nearly a million visits in a peak month and North Cascades to about ten thousand — a factor of a hundred — so on shared axes the two smaller parks would be flat against the bottom and only Olympic would be readable. Each park gets its own scale, in order of how many people they see.
The season is most of the signal. These are mountain parks with roads and passes that close, so the year is a spike: Rainier’s record month is 449,446 in July 2021, and its quietest months are two orders of magnitude below that — the record low of 98 in April 2020 is a closed park rather than a quiet one. Nothing here is seasonally adjusted, and the only comparison that means anything is with the same month a year earlier — this month against last month is just the calendar.
North Cascades counts differently after 1990, and its chart starts there. Before 1991 the series carried the whole North Cascades complex, including the Ross Lake and Lake Chelan national recreation areas — which is where nearly all the traffic is, because Highway 20 runs through Ross Lake. Counted that way it was a 600,000-visit park; counted as the park proper it is a 20,000-visit one. Neither number is wrong and the drop between them is not a collapse in visits, so drawing across it would invent a story. A recreation visit is a person entering the park for recreation, not a unique visitor: one person over a long weekend can be several.
Source: U.S. National Park Service, IRMA visitor use statistics, monthly recreation visits to Mount Rainier, Olympic and North Cascades national parks. North Cascades figures are the park proper and exclude the Ross Lake and Lake Chelan national recreation areas, which is why that series steps down after 1990. Auto-generated each build.