I live in CO and we have been to our fair share of national parks and other outdoor spots in the past few years and one of the things I now blame for overcrowdi

I live in CO and we have been to our fair share of national parks and other outdoor spots in the past few years and one of the things I now blame for overcrowding is: social media. Much in the same way that you can have 100 content creators producing similar content but only 3 out of that group go viral. I've seen instances where certain spots will go viral on social media and garner way too much attention while very similar places largely go unnoticed. A great example of this is about a year ago we were in Moab and visited both Arches and Canyonlands National Parks. Arches is arguably the prettier park but it's also much more "viral" than Canyonlands. When we went into Arches it was so crowded and we needed a "timed entry" ticket. Contrast this with Canyonlands where we felt like the only ones there, no timed entry and we saw maybe a handful of other folks at the park. This mind you is one day after Arches and these parks are maybe 45min apart. Now we have an "anti-social rule". Basically if we want to go somewhere we first check if that place is "viral" and avoid it if there's loads of buzz on social media about it.