4 days ago
Here are Yosemite's busiest entrances
Summer visitors flocking to Yosemite National Park can expect to hit the longest lines at the park's southern gate, acting superintendent Ray McPadden said Tuesday.
Located two miles from the town of Fish Camp, that gate marks the park's only south-facing entrance, making it a hotspot for visitors from the Los Angeles area. Yosemite's second-busiest access point — the Big Oak Flat entrance, off Highway 120 — shares the load of Bay Area visitors with the Arch Rock Entrance, located down Highway 140.
It's been almost three months since Yosemite began implementing a contentious new reservation system designed to keep the crowds of visitors at bay. Hourlong waits at popular entrance stations were common before the park launched its first trial reservation system five years ago. Now, McPadden said, Yosemite aims to keep wait times to a maximum of 10 minutes.
'Good news is, the vast majority of the days, you're going to wait less than 10 minutes,' McPadden told the Mariposa County Board of Supervisors this week. 'Bad news is, Saturday mornings, people are still very much piling up.'
Wait times can jump up to almost an hour between 9 and 11 a.m. on Saturday mornings, McPadden said.
Park leadership hopes to 'cycle people through faster' during these times, especially at the park's most popular entrances. They're piloting a public connectivity program at the Big Oak Flat entrance, he added — granting visitors internet access so they can pull up information about their reservation and lodgings on their cellphones while they wait in line.
Yosemite's system requires reservations for visitors who enter the park between 6 a.m. and 2 p.m. on Memorial Day weekend, between June 15 and Aug. 15, and over Labor Day weekend. It's a more relaxed version of the permanent day-use requirements that the park had planned to introduce this year, but put on an indefinite hold to give the Trump administration time to review the changes.
The first Memorial Day under the reservation requirements went smoothly in spite of initial concerns that they would sow confusion at the gates. And McPadden portrayed the 'visitor-friendly' pilot system as an overall success.
'What we're generally seeing is people are getting to go where they want to go,' McPadden said. 'Traffic is free-flowing in the park. We're not seeing crazy lines. We're not seeing our ambulances failing to get to emergencies or any other emergency service disruptions. So this is all good.'
The park is projected to hit 4.5 million visitors by the end of 2025, he added, which could make it the park's second or third busiest year on record. Yosemite set its visitation record when it welcomed more than 5 million visitors in 2016, the centennial year of the National Park system.
Although McPadden did not say whether the pilot reservation system would be here to stay, he expressed optimism that the park would soon move toward a consistent 'new normal.'
