US unemployment rate

That national park visits and unemployment should move in close formation is the kind of observation that suggests the natural world is what happens when the economy stops. Which, in 2020, it was. The bears were unimpressed.

Both moved sharply in 2020 for direct covid reasons. US unemployment spiked above 14% in April 2020 as lockdowns shut entire industries overnight, while national park visitation whipsawed as outdoor spaces became the one socially acceptable destination for suddenly-idle households. Some of those new park visitors were also newly unemployed. Some of them were remote workers escaping the apartment.

So the correlation is a portrait of a country with nowhere to be and somewhere to go. The jobs vanished. The trails filled. Neither asked the other for permission.