Yosemite visitor numbers explode as park goes away with reservations
Yosemite National Park’s month-to-month visitation numbers for March grew by over two-thirds this 12 months, in response to latest information. The rise in guests comes as the park approaches a reservation-free and doubtlessly chaotic summer time season.
According to a month-to-month public use report revealed by the National Park Service, Yosemite recorded 225,817 leisure guests in March. That’s up about 45% from the 155,758 guests recorded in March of final 12 months, and the very best variety of guests the park has seen in March since 2016.
The development is not restricted to the month of March: Recent annual visitation information confirmed that Yosemite drew more visitors in 2025 than any of the 5 earlier years, even as the park service reels from the fallout of staffing shortages and finances cuts. Conservationists who work carefully with the park worry that extra guests to Yosemite is not going to solely injury half sources but in addition enhance the expertise of visiting.
“Especially on Saturdays and sometimes also on Fridays and Sundays, the amount of crowding in the Park exceeds capacity of the parking lots, results in vehicles parked inappropriately wherever they can squeeze along roads, and results in a crammed-together visitor experience,” John Buckley, government director of the Central Sierra Environmental Resource Center, advised SFGATE in an e-mail.
According to Buckley, one visitor described a latest journey to Yosemite as being punctuated by hour-long wait instances to enter the park, automobiles parked dangerously alongside roadsides and “wall to wall” crowds of folks that had been “tripping over each other.” The visitor advised a CSERC employees member that being in Yosemite “felt like a day at Disneyland,” and that “John Muir would have been horrified” by the state of the park, Buckley wrote.
The increase in guests has come shortly after the National Park Service introduced it is going to be doing away with summer time reservation necessities at a number of in style parks, together with Yosemite. The park was hit with an especially chaotic weekend on the heels of this announcement.
Last month’s wave of holiday makers got here as staffing shortages left a number of of the park’s entrance gates unstaffed throughout common enterprise hours and typically for a number of days in a row. In an emailed assertion, a park spokesperson advised SFGATE on the time that Yosemite’s entrances are “managed based on visitation and operational needs.”
“Ray, the new Park superintendent, has made it clear that he personally sees it as desirable to have even more visitors to Yosemite rather than managing visitation to reduce vehicles, crowding and congestion,” Buckley wrote. “We’ll see how that plays out, especially from Memorial Day on through the peak summer season.”
