More than a half-million people visited the ancient cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde National Park last year.

Numbers tallied at the end of 2014 show that 505,989 people visited the national park, famous for its well preserved cliff dwellings, which were abandoned by ancestral Puebloans hundreds of years ago.

That number is up 45,752 from 2013, which saw 460,237 visitors.

It has been three years since the park has passed the half-million mark. The last time the park crossed that milestone was in 2011, when 572,329 visitors were counted at Mesa Verde.

The number of visitors at the park fluctuates. The park saw a peak number of visitors in 1988, when 772,183 visitors flocked to the ancient ruins. Ten years later, in 1998, the number of visitors was 604,556, and has been falling since.

In 2002, the numbers got down to 406,385, which also happened to be a tough wildfire season.

Fires have had a huge impact on visitors at Mesa Verde National Park. A lightning strike in 2000 scorched 19,607 acres, and the numbers of visitors fell to 452,287, down from 635,736 in 1999.

A government shutdown in 2013 saw numbers of visitors decrease in October 2013.

The highest number of visitors in 2014 came in the month of July when 104,449 people visited the park.