2021 Brought A Record Breaking Number Of Visitors To Devils Tower
Tourism is in the top 3 of largest money makers for the State of Wyoming, it's a billion dollar industry here. Over the last couple years, when the rest of the world was closed down Wyoming has been thriving thanks to families from all over the world coming to visit. All over the state the number of visitors to parks, monuments and other notable locations have mostly been record breaking.
The surge in visitors has helped some Wyoming locations recover a bit. The attendance numbers for Devils Tower National Monument had been going down after 2017. There were nearly 31,000 less visitors in 2018 that the previous year and even less over the next couple years.
Just like Yellowstone, 2021 was a GREAT year for tourism at Devils Tower. The curiosity of how the tower was made, the appeal of the unknown and the desire to explore the country are surely what drove people to stop by and take a look. It doesn't really hurt that it's just a few hours east of Yellowstone either.
2021 brought over 4.8 million visitors to Yellowstone National Park which was up over 1 million from the pandemic filled 2020. The numbers weren't as high for Devils Tower, but they were up around 100,000 more people than 2020 and the highest total ever with nearly 510,000 from May to September of 2021. For the whole year of 2021, according to the number is somewhere around 551,000.
There are many theories of how Devils Tower got there, it was featured in the movie "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and many conspiracy theorists have their thoughts of what Devils Tower is. What we do know is that it's another great landmark for us all to look at in awe.