Thursday, March 17, 2016

How do your national park views compare to the rest of the herd?

yellowstonenps on flickr.com
If you ever need a little reassurance that you're "like a lot of other folks," here's an opportunity to see how you stack up with the rest of the herd when it comes to attitudes toward your national parks.

A recent survey by everybody's favorite "senior" organization, AARP, revealed some stats that you can use for comparison purposes.

If you're a Baby Boomer, you're pretty likely to have visited some national parks – on average, 14 of them. In fact, boomers are the age group with the largest visitation rate – 75% of B. Boomers have headed into one of the nation's treasures. How does that stack up with other age brackets?

I confess, I'm old enough now that I don't know what these other groups bracket out as, so I had to look it up. You're a Gen-Xer if you were born in the early 60s to the early 80s. And of course, that leaves Millennials, born early 80s to the early 2000s. Visitation for the latter two groups breaks down to 65 and 65 percent, respectively. What's interesting about all of the generational breakdown is the purpose of park visits.

For us old foggies of the Baby Boomer generation, we're happy to "do" parks with scenic drives. All the better for me and my RV, thank you. As you get younger, the Xers are more interested in the parks from the standpoint of taking the whole family. And what surprised us, the Millennials are most likely to hit a national park that has a historical perspective to explore.

In terms of parks visited, the survey probably holds no surprises for us RVing folk. Grand Canyon, Yosemite, and Yellowstone top the list of "most visited."

To see the full story, click here.