The Central Wasatch Commission Releases Updated Visitor-Use Study

Initially released in October, 2023, the Central Wasatch Commission has released an updated version of the final Visitor Use Study report to the public. The Visitor-Use Study report details the findings of an effort designed to better understand the visitors and visitor experiences offered on Forest Service land within the Central Wasatch Mountains. The data and findings serve as a base of information that can be used to inform the decisions of both the USDA Forest Service as well as the many entities represented on the Central Wasatch Commission.

A team led by Dr. Jordan Smith, Director of the Institute of Outdoor Recreation & Tourism, and Professor in the Department of Environment and Society at Utah State University conducted the multi-year data collection and analysis for the CWC’s Visitor-Use Study and has updated the data sets illustrating annual visitation to “third sites,” or ski resorts in the Cottonwood Canyons to more realistically reflects visitation to ski resorts. In the initial report, there was a third site data weighting issue that has been corrected in the updated report.

The design and administration of the Visitor Use Study follows the USDA Forest Service’s National Visitor Use Monitoring program. As such, the Visitor Use Study provides data that are scientifically defensible and grounded in the agency’s best-practices for quantifying and characterizing outdoor recreation use. The Visitor Use Study provides a variety of insights regarding outdoor recreation use of the public lands in the Central Wasatch that, to date, have not been quantified in a systematic way. Specifically:

• The total recreational visits to public lands by canyon.
• The total recreational visits to different types of sites on public lands within the canyons.
• The proportion of visits involving different outdoor recreation activities on public lands.
• The total time visitors to the public lands in the canyons spend participating in different
activities.
• The average number of times visitors recreate on public land in the canyons each year.
• Visitors’ perceptions of crowding on public lands in the canyon.
• Visitors’ overall satisfaction with their visits to public lands in the canyons.
• The distance traveled to recreate on public lands in the canyons.
• The sociodemographic characteristics of visitors to public lands in each of the canyons.

You may read the updated Final Visitor-Use Study Report, the Trail-Use Report, and the Visitor-Use Study Phase 1 and Phase 2 Reports, on the Central Wasatch Commission website: cwc.utah.gov.