More than 10 million people visited Arizona’s national parks last year and a new report from the National Park Service found that all those visitors spent more than a billion dollars during their stay.
The agency says tourism supported 16,000 direct and indirect jobs in local communities with a cumulative economic impact of $1.8 billion.
Most of that spending was in and around Grand Canyon National Park, which welcomed 4.7 million people who spent an estimated $759 million in gateway communities.
Great Smoky Mountain National Park was the country’s most visited with spent $3 billion there.
Nationwide, the bulk of the spending went to lodging, restaurants and gas.