This National Park Service site in Pennsylvania was the 15th most popular in the US in 2021

If you camped, hiked, paddled or even strolled through the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area in 2021, you helped the National Park Service site have its best visitation year since 2013.

The nearly 70,000-acre site, which straddles the New Jersey/Pennsylvania border and headquartered in Bushkill, tallied 4,340,902 recreation visits last year, ranking 15th for visitation in the extensive NPS system.

Delaware Water Gap was outpaced on visitation by just a handful of others sites, according to the park service’s annual visitation report, released Feb. 16. The lush site, which is crossed by the Appalachian Trail, offers a swath of recreation opportunities not limited to camping, cycling and swimming. It is also home of Native American archaeological sites of the Lenape Nation and an early Dutch colonial settlement.

Unlike some other NPS holdings, Delaware Water Gap managed to maintain and even grow visitation in 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic caused other sites to shutter. The recreation area welcomed roughly 966,000 more visitors in 2021 than in 2019, park service data shows.

Three other parks in Pennsylvania also cracked the top 100 most-visited NPS sites last year.

Coming in at No. 55, Valley Forge National Historic Park, a winter campsite for the Continental Army during the American Revolution, welcomed 1,502,209 visitors in 2021. Tourism to the national historic park has begun to recover from 2020 and the onset of the pandemic, when visitation dropped by more than 47% year over year.

Trailing just behind was Independence National Historic Park, with 1,495,686 visits logged and ranking 56 overall.

Home to the Liberty Bell, Independence National Historic Park, located in Philadelphia, did see some visitation return after a drop off in 2020, when it was one of several NPS sites to close entirely to the public for some time. Still, 2021’s visitation figures there are a 67% decrease from 2019, when the site had more than 4.5 million visits.

Finally, Gettysburg National Military Park, the site of the famed American Civil War battle, ranked 97th in the system for visitation, welcoming 687,631 people. The military park is around 6,000 acres and houses more than 43,000 artifacts in its buildings.

Though the park service has recorded more than 134.3 million recreation visits since 1934, Gettysburg hasn’t reached an annual visitation of 1 million since 2017.

According to the report, other NPS holdings in Pennsylvania reported the following visitation counts for 2021:

• Flight 93 National Memorial, 424,224, rank 122
• Fort Necessity National Battlefield, 274,853, rank 151
• Upper Delaware Scenic and Recreation River, 269,810, rank 156
• Allegheny Portage Railroad National Historic Site, 187,919, rank 186
• Johnstown Flood National Memorial, 148,654, rank 194
• Steamtown National Historic Site. 54,433, rank 252
• Hopewell Furnace National Historic Site, 49,248, rank 259
• Eisenhower National Historic Site. 16,915, rank 325
• Friendship Hill National Historic Site, 16,552, rank 326

A number of NPS sites in or crossing Pennsylvania were not included in the visitation report, including the Edgar Allen Poe National Historic Site, First State National Historic Site, Gloria Dei Church National Historic Site and several trails.

The 2021 annual visitor spending report has not yet been released, but according to the NPS, visitors to national parks in Pennsylvania spent an estimated $209 million in gateway communities in 2020, supporting 3,340 jobs and contributing $312 million in economic output for the commonwealth.

Across the entire park system, visitation in 2021 was up by about 25% from the prior year, with the Blue Ridge Parkway leading with 15.9 million visitors. That site and two others — Great Smoky Mountains National Park and Golden Gate National Recreation Area — all exceeded 10 million recreational visits over the calendar year. The NPS credits much of the overall system increase to shifting COVID-19 protocols and the reopening of some attractions.

“It’s wonderful to see so many Americans continuing to find solace and inspiration in these incredible places during the second year of the pandemic,” NPS Director Chuck Sams said in a release announcing the visitation report. “We’re happy to see so many visitors returning to iconic parks like Yellowstone and Yosemite, but there are hundreds more that should be on everyone’s bucket list. Whatever experience you’re looking for in 2022, national parks are here to discover.”