EVERY year over 9m people visit Great Smoky Mountains National Park—more than twice the number who gawp at the Grand Canyon. The scenery is stupendous: from the top of Clingman’s Dome, one of the highest points in the Appalachians, a mesmerising series of hunchback ridges slopes towards the horizon, each one a paler blue echo of the last. The park also boasts over 1,000 miles of hiking, biking and riding trails, a collection of well-preserved frontier cabins, and all manner of intriguing fauna, from orange salamanders to black bears. Yet in the 30-odd years that Kent Cave has been working there, the sense that, for many tourists, the park is “an obstacle to be overcome” on the way between the souvenir stores of Cherokee, North Carolina and the amusement parks of Pigeon Forge, Tennessee has grown ever stronger.

The number of visitors to Great Smoky Mountains National Park peaked in 1999, at 10.3m. The decline since then has been relatively small. (Hard economic times favour cheap holidays.) Much the same is true of America’s whole network of national parks and monuments, which received almost 283m visitors last year, just shy of the 287m reached in 1987 and 1999.

Parks and Recreation

Simply holding their own, however, is something of a setback for America’s parks, where ever-higher numbers of visitors used to be the norm (see chart). Moreover, the average age of those who visit appears to be increasing, although data are scant. In the Smokies, the share of summer visitors aged 61 or over rose from 10% during a survey conducted in 1996 to 17% in a similar sounding in 2008; the share of those 15 and under fell from 26% to 22%. The National Park Service has all manner of explanations for its stagnating popularity. The simplest is that other forms of entertainment are distracting Americans from its charms. As Jonathan Jarvis, its director, put it in 2011: “There are times when it seems as if the national parks have never been more passé than in the age of the iPhone.” A spokesman cites the proliferation of middle-class holiday options in recent decades, from time-share accommodation that makes a regular stay at the beach affordable to family-focused developments in spots like central Florida and Las Vegas. The park service also worries that America’s minorities, who make up an ever-increasing share of the population, are not as interested in its wonders as whites. “Many immigrants come from places that have no history of parks, and they arrive with no cultural connection to places like Yellowstone or Gettysburg or Independence Hall,” Mr Jarvis noted. In response, the park service has come up with new ways to endear itself to younger, browner, technology-obsessed Americans. It has held focus groups with blacks and Hispanics to find out why they stay away. It started a programme to come up with potential parks and monuments that would reflect the history of Latinos in America, which led, among other things to the creation of a monument honouring Cesar Chavez, a Hispanic labour leader. A similar tilt towards Asian-Americans is now underway. And individual parks make a special effort to attract minorities in their hinterland, from Hindus near the Gateway National Recreation Area in New York to Vietnamese near Lowell National Historic Park in Massachusetts.

At Great Smoky Mountains National Park, meanwhile, the staff stress their efforts to engage the young and tech-savvy. They have devised a scavenger hunt conducted using satellite-navigation devices and helped to create podcasts explaining how to avoid being killed by a bear (sing as you hike so you don’t surprise it), among other subjects.

Rangers give lectures with titles like “Treemendous Programme” and “Yukky Animal Stuff” (Sniff a skunk pelt! Ogle bear scat!). Young people who attend enough of them can earn the title of “junior ranger”. Families can earn badges marking how far they have hiked together on the park’s trails. An attempt was even made to lure fitness fanatics into the park by offering a jog with a ranger. Alas, it was called off for lack of interest. (The park service as a whole still runs a campaign on the healthful effects of visiting, called “Take a hike and call me in the morning”.)

It is not clear, however, that all this will be enough to convince people to turn away from their iPhones or spend less time at Dollywood, a nearby amusement park owned by Dolly Parton, a rather successful local country singer. A 12-year-old boy queuing to ride “Wild Eagle”, Dollywood’s newest rollercoaster, explains that he has visited the amusement park four times, most recently with a youth group from his church, but has never heard of the national park. If he drove through it on the way from his home in North Carolina, he says, no one in the bus mentioned it.