Nature provides many benefits that support our health, happiness, and economies, including through recreation. In the U.S. West, both wildfires and carefully managed prescribed burns are reshaping how people experience nature, particularly when it comes to recreation. However, until now we’ve lacked a broad picture of how these fires affect visitation to public lands. To fill this gap, we combined data from social media posts, crowdsourced observations, and mobile‐phone locations with information about the landscape, roads, weather, and other factors that influence when and where people choose to visit public lands. We trained machine learning models using real visitation counts from land management agencies, then compared modeled visitation at hundreds of burned sites to similar unburned sites over time. Our preliminary results show that severe wildfires lead to noticeable drops in visits that can take years to bounce back. In contrast, low‐severity burns and prescribed fires tend to have little or no lasting effect on visitation patterns. By quantifying these patterns, our work gives land managers clear, practical guidance on how different kinds of fire affect outdoor recreation and helps them balance ecological goals with the value people receive from nature under a changing climate.