These are North Carolina's most-visited state parks

Visitation at North Carolina state parks and recreation areas eclipsed 20 million people in 2023, inching up 3.9 percent from the year prior, but down from 22.7 million in 2021.

Overall, 29 of the state’s parks and recreation areas saw upticks in visitors in 2023.

Of the state parks that made Triangle Business Journal’s latest list of 25 most-visited state parks and recreation areas, Morrow Mountain State Park in Stanly County saw the biggest uptick in visitation from 2022 to 2023, at 95 percent. Jordan Lake State Recreation Area, the state’s most-visited site in the system, saw 2.56 million visitors in 2023 – a 25 percent bump from the previous year.

On the other hand, popular spots such as Lake Norman and Jockey’s Ridge experienced steep declines — down 30 percent and 24 percent, respectively.

Kris Anne Bonifacio, public information officer for the North Carolina Division of Parks and Recreation, stresses that the visitation figures are only a rough estimates and the division’s primary concern is overall trends. And it’s evaluating other ways to measure attendance — at issue is the formula it uses to count vehicles.

“We are working with N.C. State University that will look at other sources of visitation data to compare our current method of measuring visitation and determine if we need to make updates to our process,” Bonifacio said in an email.

Using the current data, there were six state parks and natural areas that saw more than 1 million visitors in 2023 — Jordan Lake, Fort Fisher, Falls Lake, Kerr Lake, Pilot Mountain and Fort Macon — and all six also were over the 1 million mark in 2022.

North Carolina acquired more than 2,890 acres of new land in 2023, including Pisgah View State Park in Buncombe County and Bakers Lake State Natural Area in Bladen County, and now has a total of 262,074 acres.