After a healthy increase in visitor numbers at the start of the year, Yellowstone National Park reported last week that it saw another big jump in June, the first month of the tourist season.

Yellowstone spokesman Al Nash reported that the park’s June visitor count hit 669,642, a strong 7.24 percent increase over June 2013.

June numbers put Yellowstone’s visitor count from Jan. 1 to June 30 at 1,084,827. That was up 6.71 percent from the first half of 2013.

The only slump at Yellowstone this year was in February, when the 28,233 visitors counted were down just more than 9 percent from 2013. Every other month has seen an increase. June’s big numbers followed a busy May, when 310,039 visitors were tallied, up 5.73 percent from 2013.

A substantial part of the boost was from group tours, Nash said.

“The highest percentage growth in visitation is in the number of bus passengers,” he wrote, “with June bus passenger numbers up almost 25 percent at the North Entrance, and up almost 39 percent at the South Entrance.”

July is typically the busiest month of the year, Nash said, followed in order by August, June, September and May.

June numbers for Grand Teton National Park aren’t yet available, but in the first five months of the year it also saw an increase, up 4 percent from 2013 to 376,000.

Yellowstone recorded 3.69 million visitors in 2013, based on a car count that’s multiplied by a standard figure that officials say gives an accurate count. The number made Yellowstone the fourth-busiest park after Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Grand Canyon and Yosemite.

Grand Teton park had 2.68 million visitors in 2013.

This article appeared in the Jackson Hole News & Guide on July 14, 2014.