Solar Eclipse Mania: Ohio Officials Advise Travelers to Arrive Early and Stay Late

Brad Hoehne heads the John Glenn Astronomy Park in Hocking Hills, where he runs free weekend programs for the general public when the weather is warm and the skies are clear. “It’s a nice, dark location—much darker than you would get in any suburban location,” he says. “The night sky is actually quite lovely and beautiful.”  

And yet on the afternoon of April 8, when some Ohioans will be able to view a much-anticipated total solar eclipse, Hoehne won’t be at the John Glenn Astronomy Park, and he doesn’t want you to go there, either. The Hocking Hills region is not in the path of totality—a 124-mile band stretching from Texas to Maine in which viewers will be able to watch the moon completely obscure the sun. The band cuts through Ohio, but Columbus isn’t in the shadow’s path, either; the city will experience a partial eclipse, as will Cincinnati. Clevelanders will fall under the shadow in the northeast, as will Dayton and surrounding areas in the western part of the state.   

Dublin, Delaware, Lewis Center and other communities in northwestern Central Ohio reside in the path of totality, as do many of the state’s smaller cities: Bellefontaine, Wapakoneta, Lima, Bucyrus, Findlay, Mansfield, Sandusky. These rural areas are bracing for an influx of eclipse tourism in April, when hundreds of thousands of visitors could travel to Ohio to witness the state’s first total eclipse since 1806, and its last until 2099.  

None of this is a surprise to the Ohio Emergency Management Agency, which has been preparing for the April 8 eclipse for about two years. During that time, EMA has coordinated plans with countless county agencies and Ohio’s departments of Transportation, Natural Resources, Development and Education, along with the State Highway Patrol, NASA and the National Weather Service.   

“When there's an influx of people, there is a strain, a drain and a need for fuel, lodging, food and traffic management,” says Ohio EMA executive director Sima Merick. “And then what affects all of that is the weather, because this is an outdoor event.”  

Based on modeling that was still in process at press time, Merick says visitor estimates are around 100,000 to 200,000, “but there's nothing specific. It could be more. It could be less.”  

“We’ve heard everything from 100,000 people to half a million people,” says ODOT spokesman Matt Bruning. “It's all going to depend on the weather. If it's a bright, clear, sunny day, Ohio is going to have a lot of people in it. If it turns out it's going to look like more of a cloudy day, and it might be brighter in Missouri, then everyone's going to go to Missouri.”  

Even though April 8 is a Monday, a lot of young Ohioans will also be free to travel around the state since many schools aren’t holding classes. In Central Ohio, most of the largest districts have scheduled professional development days (or something similar) and closed schools for students on April 8, including Columbus City Schools, Olentangy Schools, Westerville City Schools, Dublin City Schools, Hilliard City Schools and Delaware City Schools. South-Western City Schools scheduled an early release.

An eclipse event is unique in its unpredictability. While it’s easy enough to look up the path of totality and the duration of darkness in different areas (with a maximum of nearly four minutes in Ohio), no one knows exactly where eclipse chasers, also known as umbraphiles, will go. An event like 2016’s Republican National Convention in Cleveland brought visitors from all over the country to Ohio, which required months of planning, but everyone stayed within a small geographic area. “If social media blows up and says, ‘It's cloudy in Darke County. Everyone go to Hardin County. It's perfect and sunny here.’ Guess what everybody's going to do?” Bruning says. “That's not something that happens at Red White and Boom or the RNC.”  

Plus, aside from Cleveland, many of the areas in the path of totality are rural, without the infrastructure of a large metropolitan area. “These roads are not meant for 100,000 people a day,” Bruning says. “These are two-lane roads, a lot of farmland.”  

Still, Merick says EMA’s modeling suggests most visitors like to be close to populated areas. “People like their creature comforts,” she says. “People like to be able to sleep in a hotel.”  

For those who don’t need those amenities, ODNR is ready. Lindsay Deering, information and education administrator with the Division of Parks and Watercraft, says ODNR has highlighted 18 parks in the path of totality, including nearby Alum Creek State Park and Delaware State Park. “Our reservation system opens up six months in advance, and we had people booking right away for some of those parks that are in the totality area,” Deering says. 

To help manage crowds and traffic congestion, ODNR isn’t allowing overnight campers to arrive or depart on April 8; they can arrive on April 7 or earlier and depart on April 9 or later. (Check campsite availability at reserveohio.com.) ODNR has traffic flow plans in place and took notes from agencies in states that experienced a total eclipse in 2017, like Kentucky and Oregon. “Kentucky is a little similar to Ohio,” Deering says. “Some of our parks only have one road in and one road out. There's going to be traffic congestion.”  

ODOT, too, has been brainstorming with and learning from other states. “I've had conversations with Arkansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Indiana, Illinois, Tennessee. ... We've also talked to states that were in the path of totality last time,” Bruning says. “One of the things that we've heard has been the issue is not so much the people coming, it's them leaving. Everyone would trickle in over a prolonged period of time, but once the event is over, everyone wants to leave at the same time.”  

Because of that, you’ll likely hear the same message repeated often leading up to April 8: Come early, stay late. “One of the things that needs to be packed in your to-go bag is patience,” Merick says, “because we want everyone to have a good time and enjoy it.”  

Travel Tips for Watching the Eclipse

Three don’ts for travelers to keep in mind: 

• Don’t pull off the road and park on private property, even if it looks like empty farmland. 
• Don’t call 911 for nonemergency situations, like sitting in traffic.  
• Don’t get aggressive on the road. “Everybody just needs to take a breath,” says ODOT spokesman Matt Bruning. “Hopefully the excitement of seeing that really cool event sticks with you as you patiently wait to get back to your destination.” 

This story is from the March 2024 issue of Columbus Monthly. 

Editor’s note: This story was updated to include the April 8 closure of Hilliard City Schools.