I was looking at crowd calendar for January ‘23 and noticed that Wednesday 1/25 is predicted to have a crowd level of 8 but all of the other days around that are lower, including the weekends. Does anyone know why this day would be predicted to have higher crowds?
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Be aware that these CLs and waits are not definite until about 45 - 30 days out. Right now they are just using historical data for 2019, 2020, 2021. *(Sadly, this is an average using all the reported wait times. The waits in 2020 & 2021 were low because people weren’t travelling as much.)
TP & CL’s shouldn’t be used to determine your travel dates. They just are helpful to see “trends” in crowds.
Basically, start making your plans, but know that your “real” plan won’t be ready until about 30 days in advance.
I love TP but any CL # that is more than 45 - 30 days out I no longer trust. Wait and see… it’ll fluctuate. TP only updates about 45 - 30 days in advance and copies & pastes the previous year’s historical info into the farther away future dates.
Also, sometimes that far in advance they are just using the historical data from that calendar date and not adjusted for the day of the week.
For example, if your trip starts on a Monday, that day was probably a Sat. or Sun. in 2020. So you might see a CL10 because this year that “date” was a weekend. When they update the calendar in 2021 they’ll adjust for that date being on Monday this time.
Every different website crowd calendar has their own way of getting their CL number. I like to look at multiples to get a better idea of when it is a “slower” time to go. CLs for a specific date aren’t reliable.
As stated a good TP will put you ahead of 85%+ of the people wandering around asking, “Well… what do you want to do next?”
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Thanks, that makes sense!
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CLs are also how long you wait not how crowded. I remember shock waves in January 2020 when wait times (hence CLs) we’re through the roof because they reduced capacity. The parks were empty so if you wanted to walk the WS or a trail at AK it was nice and empty it was just rude lines that were long.
Is it a race day?
Nope. Marathon weekend is earlier in January.
I like to look at previous days’ actual data as my trip gets closer.