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The number of visits to Acadia National Park this winter and spring, outside the park’s busy tourist season, was the lowest it has been since before the COVID pandemic.
The park recorded fewer visitors from November through April than in any other offseason since 2020, when the COVID pandemic disrupted tourism nationwide. Acadia got a little more than 200,000 visits over those six months, representing an 11% drop from the previous offseason.
The drop comes as a surprise in the wake of 2025, when Acadia set an all-time annual record of 4,079,318 visits. The previous record of 4,069,098 was set in 2021, when outdoor recreation surged across the country in reaction to the onset of COVID the prior year.
The vast majority of people who visit the park do so between May 1 and Oct. 31 of each year.
This offseason’s drop from previous winter and spring may reflect the season’s harsh winter, former Acadia superintendent Sheridan Steele said, cautioning he could only speculate. Cold temperatures and heavy snow likely kept some visitors away, he added.
The slow season also comes at an uncertain time for the park, which has grappled with federal funding cuts and a wave of policy changes since President Donald Trump was sworn into office in January 2025. In addition to staffing cuts and a hiring freeze, Acadia officials, and park staff across the country, have been ordered to remove content about climate change and Indigenous history from park materials, and to charge a $100 entrance fee to noncitizen visitors.
Most recently, Acadia’s citizen advisory commission missed its second meeting in a row because, according to the body’s chair, the meeting wasn’t cleared through Washington.
Steele, who retired in 2015 after leading the park for 12 years, noted that greater snowfall typically tends to attract visitors who enjoy various winter activities — Acadia has miles of carriage roads and unplowed fire roads where cross-country skiing, snowshoeing and snowmobiling is allowed. The park averages 60 inches of snow per year, according to the park service.
Mount Desert Island, where most of Acadia is located, had a particularly wintery January, recording an average temperature of 19 degrees Fahrenheit and 30.2 inches of snowfall, according to National Weather Service data.
While the offseason recorded fewer visitors, it was still busier than any winter prior to 2020-21 — except for the 2015-16 offseason, according to National Park Service data. The park service and Acadia had its centennial anniversary in 2016, when the park passed 3 million visits a year.
Prior to that, Acadia’s busiest offseason on record was 1999-2000, driven by tourists visiting the park at the turn of the millennium.
As part of its record-breaking visits last year, the park recorded its busiest single month ever last August, even with fewer international visitors in Maine and a sharp decline of cruise ship passengers in Bar Harbor.
The lull over the winter and early part of the spring has not lasted, however. Last month, visitation hit 335,236, which was the highest May total in two years.