Abstract: Many experience projects have been developed in desert tourist areas based on unique natural landscape resources. These experience projects have become the largest bright spots and core attractions in desert tourism. With the rapid increase of tourists, the desert ecological environment and recreation facilities suffered significant impact and even broke through bearing capacity, which led to the decrease of the quality of the tourist experience, and affect the desert tourism sustainable development. Therefore, take Shapotou scenic area in Ningxia as an example, and take sandboarding, rope gliding over the Yellow River, rafting, sand surfing and camel riding as research projects, the paper evaluated bearing capacity of these experience projects from the angle of resource ontology and tourists experience perception. The results showed that:(1) The visitor numbers of all projects were close to or exceed the maximum bearing capacity of facilities, far above the best level of the visitors experience; (2) The key factors of the different projects to limit bearing capacity were different; (3) The bearing capacity of tourist experience was often below bearing capacity of project facilities. According to the evaluation result, we find out the key limiting factors of the bearing capacity of each project and predict extensible bearing capacity of some projects.

Key words: desert experience project, bearing capacity, Shapotou, Ningxia