The pandemic was a boost for Twin Cities parks, and they’re still going strong

It was July 2020, and Minnesotans were feeling isolated and cooped up. Some of the early COVID-19 restrictions were lifting, and the weather was getting nicer.

Bev Moe, a dedicated hiker and active member of Twin Cities hiking meetups, organized a Friday morning hike — capped at 10 people in accordance with pandemic rules — at Three Rivers Park District’s Hyland Lake Park Reserve in Bloomington.

The Hyland Sole Mates, now a bigger group, are still hiking every Friday.

“We do it all year-round,” Moe said on a hike last week celebrating the group’s five-year anniversary. “We do it in the winter, too.”

Moe and her hiking friends are among the many thousands of people across the Twin Cities who have made regional parks and trails a fixture in their lives since the pandemic. Visits boomed during the pandemic, according to estimates from the Metropolitan Council. They’ve remained at near-record levels since then, despite a slight dip in 2024 researchers largely attribute to rain.

“There were a lot of people that really felt like they were introduced to the regional system during COVID,” said Emmett Mullin, the Met Council’s manager of regional parks and natural resources.

People are visiting parks in their own backyards more, park operators say, and thanks to more flexible work schedules, they’re visiting at more times of the day.

“Park use is around the clock,” said Boe Carlson, superintendent of Three Rivers Parks in the west and south metro. “Pre-COVID, where it was typical holidays, weekends, evenings, that kind of thing. Now you’re seeing it every day. I think the flexibility of people’s schedules, they’re finding more opportunities to go to the parks and utilize them.”

 The sustained visitor interest is welcome, but it can also make it more difficult to keep up with park maintenance.

The Met Council tracks the park usage data at 10 partner agencies to help understand trends and inform decisions on funding for regional parks, which tend to be destination parks within the metro area.

This year’s data, based on a five-year rolling average, showed a small dip, something researcher Ismael Ramirez said is largely attributable to rain on 45 out of the 99 days visitor data samples were collected. Trail usage saw a smaller dip.

“I think what happened is that the visitation was still consistently high,” Ramirez said. But he thinks people may have planned around rain days.

Three Rivers Park District saw a roughly 1% dip in visitation in 2024, but Carlson said enthusiasm for parks has not waned.

“People really discovered the parks and fell in love with them, or fell in love with them all over again, and now it’s just become a way of life,” Carlson said.

Carver County Parks saw the largest jump in visitation in 2024, up 14%, something parks and trails supervisor Sam Pertz attributes to population growth in the fast-growing southwest metro and new park amenities to serve those people.

He pointed to the recently added mountain biking trails at Carver Park Reserve and upgrades to Lake Waconia Regional Park, including the opening of Coney Island of the West, an island that was formerly home to a historic resort and now hosts picnickers.

He also noted Carver County eliminated park usage fees in 2019, a move he said has boosted visits. The goal was to make access to parks more accessible, but Pertz said as a side-effect, the increased visits help because it factors into Met Council funding.

“That has been really influential in our systems being used, to eliminate that $5 to $8 barrier,” Pertz said.

Minneapolis’ regional parks are, by far, the most popular in the regional system, with an estimated 25 million visits last year.

Many of those parks are destinations for people from around the Twin Cities — and visitors from elsewhere, said Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board Superintendent Al Bangoura. He noted the Chain of Lakes is the second most visited place in Minnesota, after the Mall of America.

On a hot, sunny Friday morning, the park at Bde Maka Ska was bustling with sailing groups, walkers, bikers, paddleboaters and runners.

Josh Xiong cast a line into the lake, where he’s long loved to fish. Before the pandemic, he said, it would often just be him and his little brother casting from the shore.

Now, when he goes a couple of times a week, they often share the shoreline with 10 to 15 others. He attributes the increase to social media creating buzz.

“All these YouTubers are just hyping it up,” he said.

Those additional visits to parks illustrate how well the region’s parks are integrated into their cities, and their residents’ lives, Bangoura said.

But more visits also bring challenges, he said: People notice when they see the boardwalk closed for repairs at Minnehaha Falls Regional Park or cracked pavement along the Chain of Lakes trails.

“We are loved to death,” Bangoura said.

Bangoura said he hopes people recognize parks need more funding as they become bigger parts of their lives.

“The pandemic was just a really big inflection point, in a sense, because the one thing you could do at that time was go to a park,” he said.