For decades, the Oregon Caves National Monument and Preserve has been Oregon’s quietest national park site, a remote destination at the end of a long, winding road in the southwest corner of the state that fewer than 100,000 people visit each year.
Those facts didn’t change last year, but the national monument, known for its spectacular marble cave system and dark skies, did see a dramatic increase in visitors in 2024, resulting in its largest annual visitor count since 2003.
A total 94,016 visitors showed up to the Oregon Caves last year, according to National Park Service data, a 193% increase over the 2023 count that saw 32,041 people stop by. The last time the park’s annual visitor count exceeded 100,000 was in 1995.
Jeremy Curtis, superintendent of the Oregon Caves, said the large increase over 2023’s numbers could be attributed to a few factors, all related to the roads that lead to the park.
In August 2023, wildfires shut down U.S. 199 in southern Oregon, a closure that remained in place until that winter. The road closure limited visitor park access and created “a huge impact on visitation” during the height of summer, Curtis said.
The visitor numbers at the end of 2023 were low, according to park data, but they weren’t significantly lower than in the previous months, all of which saw below average traffic. Curtis said the culprit was a different travel issue.
A park road project snarled traffic from June to October 2023, resulting in wait times of up to 20 minutes each way, Curtis said. “Visitors were alerted to this, and many changed their plans and did not come to the park,” he wrote in an email.
That might explain why the 2023 visitor numbers were so low, but it doesn’t explain why 2024 saw such a huge increase in crowds. Curtis did not have a definitive explanation, but did have one theory.
The 2023 road project moved the traffic counter that gives the park its visitor numbers farther up the road, from the main parking lot to the park boundary three miles away. “This location captures traffic as soon as it enters the park, rather than just at the parking lot for cave tours,” Curtis explained, which may have inflated the number of park visitors.
The surge in visitors harkens back to the 1960s and ‘70s, when the Oregon Caves regularly reported annual visitor counts over six figures. The park’s busiest year was 1972, when 197,811 people stopped by, according to National Park Service data.
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