These 4 Utah state parks have passed a million annual visitors

SALT LAKE CITY — Siblings Kimber and Levi Carrigan showed off the rocks they picked up Wednesday at the Great Salt Lake Marina.

“I like it here,” 10-year-old Kimber said. “I like the mountains and stuff.”

Her younger brother, Levi, held up the rocks in his hand and said he picked them up in the “ocean.” He meant the shores of the Great Salt Lake, as the marina is a state park.

Plenty of children, parents, grandparents and all sorts of other people have visited Utah’s 44 state parks in recent years. In the year before the pandemic, the state’s parks received about 7.4 million visitors.

In fiscal year 2024, the number almost reached 12.9 million. That year, four state parks — Antelope Island, Dead Horse Point, Sand Hollow and Snow Canyon — each received more than a million visitors.

“One of the big reasons we saw that big increase was because Utah State Parks didn’t close,” said Scott Strong, the director of Utah State Parks.

Visitation declined to 12.2 million in the fiscal year that ended with June, but Utah’s busiest state park, Sand Hollow, is still receiving as many visitors as central Utah’s Capitol Reef National Park.

“Our visitation is staying consistent and normalizing,” Strong said.

Taxes help fund the museums that state parks operate, and the Utah Legislature has appropriated money to add parks like the new Utahraptor State Park near Moab.

The legislature has also funded improvements like campground renovations, but Strong says the operations of the parks themselves are paid for with visitation or user fees.

“We’ve got a potential expansion project at Gunlock State Park,” Strong said, “that would move onto [Bureau of Land Management] property, and they’ve been great to work with.”

Back at the marina, Kimber, whose family was visiting from Cottage Grove, Minn., had her own pitch for why people should visit that park.

“I think people should know about this,” she said, “and get out here because it’s a really nice place.”