“The most people that have been in Wyoming since ever”

Eclipse enthusiasts in Wyoming on Monday didn’t just witness history, they made it: the sparsely populated state had the most traffic it has ever seen, as more than half a million people rushed to their cars and hopped on the road to get home just seconds after the moon blocked the sun.

“I’m going to go ahead and guess this is the most people that have been in Wyoming since ever,” Wyoming Department of Transportation spokesman Doug McGee said Tuesday. “Our highway system was taxed like it’s never been before. The roads just weren’t designed for that volume of traffic.”

With an estimated increase of more than 536,000 vehicles on the road, traffic surged to historic levels as the crowds that had flocked to the state left as quickly as they came, adding never-before-seen pressure on the highways. The number of cars participating in the mass exodus rivaled the 636,294 registered cars and pickup trucks in Wyoming as of 2016, McGee said.

Out-of-towners easily doubled the 2016 state population of 585,501. If an average of two people were in each vehicle, the number of visitors was more than a million.

“It was definitely the biggest one day event in Wyoming’s history,” said Wyoming Office of Tourism spokeswoman Tia Troy.

For many drivers, the stop-and-go traffic on interstates, two-lane highways and county roads turned what ordinarily would be a four-hour drive from Denver into a frustrating, 10- or 12-hour marathon.

A hush settled over the crowds lining highways and flocking to public spaces as day turned briefly to night in parts of Wyoming late Monday morning. Crickets chirped, temperatures dropped, and an eerie calm spread across the landscape as the sunny sky dissolved into hues of purple and glorious blue.

Moments later, the sun peeked out again, and Wyoming’s roadways suddenly resembled the road to Reno after Burning Man, or the packed freeway lanes in Los Angeles during rush hour.

The number of cars on the road rose almost 68 percent compared to the five-year average for the third Monday in August, according to the Wyoming Department of Transportation.

Traffic on U.S. 85 south of LaGrange increased by 821 percent. Laramie County, where Interstate 25 and Interstate 80 meet, saw 209,394 vehicles more than usual Monday.

“It took five days for those crowds to build,” McGee said. “And yet they all decided to leave at exactly the same time, one after another.”

Interstate 25 at the Colorado state line saw a 167 percent increase in traffic going north and south on Monday, a total of 38,247 extra vehicles, according to WYDOT. Aimee Inama, spokeswoman for WYDOT, said the numbers are based on individual counters that were stationed throughout the state.

By the time traffic reached Colorado, it tended to ease up, said Jared Fiel, a Colorado Department of Transportation spokesman. CDOT estimated an additional 34,000 vehicles poured onto southbound Interstate 25 Monday afternoon through Tuesday morning, Fiel said.

“We had steady streams but the real standstill was in Wyoming,” Fiel said in an email. “By the time they got to Colorado, they entered at a slow and steady pace so we didn’t have huge backups.”

Fiel said the numbers were less than the department had prepared for. Before the eclipse, CDOT warned that up to 600,000 people might travel to Wyoming for the eclipse, twothirds of them coming from the south.

Both departments of transportation reported that despite the crush of traffic, drivers were understanding about the long hours it took to get home.

“I know a lot of people were frustrated, but they seemed to understand, OK we filled this state to over capacity so it’s probably going to take a while to get out,” McGee said. “I thought we’d be getting beat up today, and we just aren’t.”