Two popular Maryland parks will require reservations during peak days

Washington Post

22-05-2025

Maryland officials are hoping that if a new crowd control plan works, visitors to some of the state's most popular parks will not have to camp out before busy days as early as midnight.
Starting Memorial Day weekend, visitors hoping to enter Greenbrier State Park in Western Maryland and Annapolis's Sandy Point State Park, which has a beach looking out toward the Chesapeake Bay, will need to make reservations on weekends and holidays.
'You'd have people lining up for, say, Greenbrier at 4 a.m., 3 a.m. and even midnight in some cases. We'd open up the gates, we'd let a certain amount of people in, then we would have to close the park to new visitors for hours at a time,' said Tim Hamilton, business and marketing manager for the Maryland Park Service.
The day-use pass system went live Monday and is aimed at reducing crowds and traffic backups and ensuring spots for visitors. Reservations for these parks will be mandatory during the peak periods of weekends and holidays from May 24 through Labor Day. No same-day access will be allowed during those times. Admission will be $5 per person. At Greenbrier, out-of-state visitors will be charged $7.
Visitors can book their spots online up to seven days in advance of a visit. Reservations may be changed or canceled until 8 a.m. the day before the scheduled arrival. Confirmation emails, along with a QR code that is scanned for admission at the park, will be sent to visitors who successfully reserve a spot.
Discussions about implementing a reservation system statewide began as early as 2019, Hamilton said. Officials ran a pilot program that year of the reservation system at Rocks State Park, which houses Kilgore Falls, a picturesque 17-foot-high waterfall. Hamilton said it was chosen because it was a popular destination, with a small parking lot that caused backups for locals and pulled park rangers away from essential safety duties.
'We introduced the system kind of quietly,' Hamilton said. 'People were not thrilled with it because this was change, and change is difficult for everybody.
'But after two or three weeks, people started to grumble a little bit less and they found out, 'Oh, now I know whether or not I can get in off the bat. I don't have to go and wait in line only to be told I can't get in and I turn around and I burned half the day.''
The need for reservations became more pressing after a spike of visitors to parks following the start of the coronavirus pandemic, said Gregg Bortz, a spokesman for the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, which manages the state's Park Service. Park visitation rates increased from an average of 10.8 million per year from 2010 to 2019 to an average of 18.7 million per year from 2020 through 2024, Bortz said.
Bortz and Hamilton pointed to similar, effective reservation systems used by other agencies, including the National Park Service. They did not specify what officials have determined as the capacity limit for these parks but said that the caps can vary based on parking availability, events and other factors.
Sandy Point is a popular destination for Maryland residents and out-of-towners who want to set up cookouts and get a look at the Chesapeake Bay Bridge along the roughly one-mile-long stretch of sand. Greenbrier, located in Boonsboro, houses campsites and hiking trails that surround a 42-acre man-made freshwater lake and a white sandy beach.
They were chosen as the first to require reservations because they were shut down for capacity reasons fairly frequently, Hamilton said. Traffic at Greenbrier would stretch two to three miles. Traffic jams at Sandy Point, which sits at the foot of the Bay Bridge, would snarl traffic for those looking to cross over to other Maryland and Delaware beaches.
'Wherever you have water in Maryland parks, that's where people want to be,' Hamilton said.
The reservation system will be rolled out to three other state parks this summer: Point Lookout, Newtowne Neck and North Point. But officials did not specify a timeline for when changes would take effect at those locations. Bortz said exact dates would be announced in the coming weeks.
Hamilton said patience will be key for anyone looking to spend a day by the water at these Maryland state parks. That goes for him and his team, too.
'If there are some bumps along the first couple of weekends, which we expect there to be here and there, we are watching them carefully with the mind that we are going to react to that and make some changes if we have to,' Hamilton said.