According to what I read, the park encompasses 520,976 acres with 10 million visitors per year. On any given day of the year you could have an average of about 27,000 people in the park. So if you use basic division that comes to about 0.05 people per acre if they were evenly dispersed throughout the park. It's ridiculous to think of a person in terms of a unit such as 0.05 so in essence you would end up with roughly one person per 20 acres on any given day.
Since the visitors aren't evenly dispersed and there are only 1108 camp sites and about 800 miles of trails in the park it seems logical that the vast majority of the visitors will be located in those areas. So how much area of the park would remain visitor free if you think of it in that way?
Now I'm proud of you. Because you've started to anchor this in concrete terms. There are some important adjustments to make now.
The vast majority of visitors are in the summer season. So the visitors per acre is more like three times as high during that season, and you are down to maybe five to seven acres per person or something like that. But the people are not
stationary. They are driving, hiking, biking, rafting, etc. for
miles.
Game do not travel randomly. They use trails and terrain the same way that people do. Three people can do a game drive covering
hundreds of acres. It sounds like a lot - a hundred acres per person, wow. But the fact you are moving and that game travels along corridors means it isn't very much land at all. And you can SEE great distances, so positioning yourself on a vantage point while others are driving means your effective coverage is way greater.
Animals follow regular patterns too. Any boob knows that they move in the wee hours. They get up, pee, go get a drink, feed, lie down, feed, get a drink, and go to bed. They move along regular corridors between those watering, feeding, and bedding areas so a person with half a brain can just wait at the right spot, and catch them moving between regular daily activities.
These bigfoot hunters demonstrate they don't know a thing about game when they open their mouths because all of this basic stuff is completely missing from their discussions. That means they are either stupid or they are con-men. Neither is a category you want to belong to.
I would imagine wildlife enumerators would use similar statistical methods that I use in epidemiology to figure out what the population of any given species, or species diversity happens to be in any given area. I'm not familiar enough with what they do to say with any certainty.
That's why I asked. Because you don't know, and have never thought about it. Knowing how they do this makes nonsense out of most of the eary stuff you posted.
They have done experiments for over half a century on things like supercub counts. If you have a known number of elk in a fenced area then it is easy to determine what the relationship is between how many you see from the air according to every conceivable variable - airspeed, amount of cover, weather, altitude, etc. They have been publishing this stuff in professional wildlife journals since the 1930's and computer programs are sold to wildlife agencies with all of this automated. All they need is an employee in the back seat of a supercub.
They also do grid searches for poop piles. Same thing there - the relationship between known animal counts and poop piles is well documented and they merely apply that known relation. Since there has never been a single bigfoot poop pile discovered, none of these wildlife enumerators see them when counting sheep poop, moose poop, mule deer poop etc. every single year they are doing counts.
All of that acreage you thought was non-observed is covered by professional wildlife enumerators looking for big game. If the professionals that are being paid to count game numbers that are critical to determine hunting quotas do not see bigfeets while they are looking for all these other game animals then they simply aren't there.
