National Park sites in southern Idaho drew in hundreds of thousands of visitors last year, despite a 43-day partial government shutdown and staff shortages amid a federal hiring freeze.
Roughly 431,000 people visited Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve, Hagerman Fossil Beds National Monument, City of Rocks National Reserve and Minidoka National Historic site in 2025.
A record 43,539 visited either Minidoka near Jerome or its sister site on Bainbridge Island in Washington last year. That’s almost twice the number of visitors compared to 2024, also a record year.
Friends of Minidoka director Robyn Achilles said visitors expressed concerns over DOGE cuts and the Trump administration policies.
“They really wanted to go see the site, especially given some of the immigration issues that have surfaced in this year,” she said.
During World War II, the U.S. imprisoned 120,000 people of Japanese descent in concentration camps across the country, most built in very isolated places in the West. A little less than two thirds were American citizens. From 1942 to 1945, the government incarcerated 13,000 people at the Minidoka site.
“It just shows how important this story is," Achilles added. “Why we preserve it and why we tell the lessons and legacy of the unjust incarceration, because we want to try to ensure that it doesn't happen again. And make sure that the story isn't buried or whitewashed.”
She said, in recent years, the National Park Service and Friends of Minidoka have done a lot of outreach and community programming, which also increased public awareness of the site.
Since February 2025, the National Park Service has been under a hiring freeze, with south Idaho parks operating with 35% vacancy and no possibility to fill those positions. Achilles said employees, many of whom work across the four south Idaho parks, are stretched thin.
“They're doing all they can to take up the slack, but it's unsustainable,” she said.
In 2025, National Parks across the U.S. were visited more than 323 million times, a slight decrease from 2024.
