Yosemite Might Bring Back Reservations as Park Is Overwhelmed With Crowds Again

Every year for the past quarter-century, Stephen Contreras and his family have been among the millions of people who visit Yosemite National Park to see the world-famous cliffs of El Capitan and waterfalls dropping melting snow more than 2,000 feet into the valley below.

When he returned earlier this month, Contreras found unbearable delays and overwhelming crowds. Park officials have reported that waits to get into the park are as long as three hours. Exasperated tourists far from the nearest toilet are leaving human waste along the roadside and in parking lots.

“I wanted to leave the second day I was there because it wasn’t fun,” said Contreras, a 45-year-old truck driver from Whittier, Calif., who got a $150 ticket for driving family members in the back of his pickup when they got sick of waiting for a shuttle bus with space.

This year Yosemite dropped a reservation system it launched at the start of the pandemic to keep too many people from entering at once and potentially spreading Covid-19.

With no restrictions on attendance, tourists are flooding the park. In June, 65,136 vehicles entered through one of Yosemite’s busiest entrances, called Arch Rock, up more than 50% from a year earlier.

Park leaders are now laying the groundwork to bring the reservation system back in order to get a handle on out-of-control crowds.

“Folks really want us to do something,” said Cicely Muldoon, Yosemite’s superintendent. “The visitor experience is not good.”

Under the reservation system, people had to nab one of a limited number of slots during peak daytime hours in the summer to enter Yosemite, one of America’s best known and most popular national parks.

Many who landed a reservation were thrilled to experience Yosemite without Disneyland-esque lines. National parks have become increasingly overcrowded in recent years, particularly as people were eager to get outside during the pandemic.

Yosemite leaders held a virtual meeting July 19 as part of a two-month public comment period on how to address overcrowding. In the meeting, Muldoon said Yosemite is considering going back to a temporary reservation system in 2024 to avoid a repeat of this year’s problems. She said in a subsequent interview that the park might then make the system permanent.

Visits to Yosemite are down 24% through June this year compared with 1.7 million a year earlier. Crowding has been worse, however, because several roads were closed after the park was buried under record snow last winter. Yosemite typically attracts about four million visitors annually.

Matt Barrios beat the crowd by getting up at 3:30 a.m. Saturday so that his family would be among the first to drive over Tioga Pass into the Yosemite high country Saturday. “As far as traffic this morning, the pass was very clear,” said the 33-year-old Barrios from Fresno, Calif.

Yosemite wasn’t the first park to institute reservations. Rocky Mountain National Park began using them in 2019 to control crowds and has continued every summer since. Others instituted them more recently, including Utah’s Arches National Park, which previously filled up and had to close its gates as early as 9 a.m.

One constituency isn’t thrilled about a potential return of reservations at Yosemite: nearby shops, hotels and restaurants that depend on tourists who pump an estimated $437 million annually into the local economy.

Occupancies at hotels around Yosemite were down between 10% and 25% last summer compared with the summer of 2019 when the park was last open without reservations, said Teri Marshall, marketing director at two area lodges.

She said the park’s use of a timed system from 6 a.m. to 4 p.m. last year, when reservations were extended because of construction, was too restrictive because it prevented people from even driving through Yosemite without getting out of their cars.

“The economic effects to people who rely on tourism have been devastating,” Marshall said. “It went too far.”

Other business owners are open to some form of reservations, because they, too, want visitors to be happy, said Jonathan Farrington, chief executive officer of the Yosemite Mariposa County Tourism Bureau.

“For all of us, the question is what is the best number,” he said.

Write to Jim Carlton at [email protected]