This one will turn political - even though it shouldn't - so I better get this in now. Here is the situation in Washington state:
https://ofm.wa.gov/washington-data-research/statewide-data/washington-trends/population-changes/population-change-natural-increase-and-net-migration
Our "natural increase" is still positive but is now much smaller than our in-migration. I wonder if King County has reached zero natural increase, but I was unable to find the same data at the county level.
Population and trail crowding are of course correlated, but maybe not as much as with lifestyle and demographic changes. Do older people hike more or less? My informal take is younger folks hike less, as my (older) demographic seems overrepresented in the backcountry. But maybe the younger folks all go to the same places (the Instagram effect?).
Between every two pines is a doorway to the new world. - John Muir
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Between every two pines is a doorway to the new world. - John Muir
Population growth in King county has been driven mostly by people moving here for good employment. My dad came here in the '50s to work on the KC-135 project for Boeing. I worked for MSFT from '95 to '15 -- I almost always was the only "local" on every team I worked on -- with other people on my team from Taiwan, Mainland China, England, Quebec, India, Lebanon, Serbia, Ukraine , Florida, Ohio, SoCal, Boston, New Hampshire, New York, Virginia, CD, Georgia, Texas.
Natural increase isn't what it was when I was a kid -- in my suburban neighborhood pretty much every house has a family with 3-4 school age kids. Now that neighborhood is more a mixture with empty nester households and family household -- but most school age families having more like 1-2 kids rather than 3-4.
But this a longer term trend --- my dad was on the school board in the '80s and one of the issues they had to deal with was school closures as the elementary aged school population had dropped so much as the "baby boom/Boeing Boom" crop of kids aged out.
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