Yellowstone Treasures Blog

Visitation to Yellowstone Park set a record of 3.29 million in 2009, despite the recession and last winter's relatively low number of snow-time vacationers. According to the Billings Gazette (disclosure: that's my hometown newspaper):
"The previous record for visitation, 3.15 million people, was set in 2007. The numbers in 2009 were 7.5 per-ent above 2008’s 3.06 million visitors and 4.6 percent above 2007.
“The increase in park visits could reflect free access on two summer weekends, attention from a new PBS television series on national parks and relatively low gasoline prices."
For the whole January 5th article, see: "Record number visited Yellowstone in 2009".

Just for my own edification, I compared last year's sales of Yellowstone Treasures with those of 2007 and 2008 and found that 41% more books were sold in 2009 than in 2007 and 38% more than in 2008. In addition to the factors mentioned in the Gazette article, I attribute that gratifying increase to a step-up in media publicity about the book and to word-of-mouth—especially when Amazon.com chose to include a copy of the guidebook in their sweepstakes week that offered a YNP tour and thousands of dollars of Canon photo equipment.