Yosemite National Park is grappling with a surge of visitors following the federal government’s decision to scrap its advance reservation system — and the crush of tourists has some comparing the park to a theme park.
On Feb. 18, Yosemite Superintendent Ray McPadden announced that the park would no longer require timed vehicle entry reservations, even during peak summer months. The decision came after an analysis found that most weekdays maintained available parking and stable traffic flow, leading officials to conclude a season-wide reservation requirement was “not the most effective approach for 2026.” Arches National Park in Utah and Glacier National Park in Montana also dropped their own reservation systems for 2026 in separate announcements around the same time.
The park said it would instead rely on strategies developed during the 2025 season, including real-time traffic monitoring, active parking management and additional staffing at key intersections during peak periods.
The results have been immediate. Yosemite welcomed 225,817 recreational visitors in March — a nearly 45% increase over March of the prior year and the park’s busiest March since 2016. By Memorial Day weekend, the park’s first major holiday test without a reservation system, visitors were reporting waits of at least 90 minutes at entrance gates, packed parking lots and gridlocked shuttle lines.
“I would say by 7:30, the entire park, it was impossible to park there,” visitor John Leerskov told ABC7. “There’s nowhere to park for anybody.” Another visitor, Andranik Arakelyan, said people were waiting at least an hour and a half just to enter.
John Buckley, executive director of the Central Sierra Environmental Resource Center, described the situation in an interview with SFGate: “Especially on Saturdays and sometimes also on Fridays and Sundays, the amount of crowding in the park exceeds the capacity of the parking lots, results in vehicles parked inappropriately wherever they can squeeze in along roads, and results in a crammed-together visitor experience.”
Mr. Buckley said a park visitor had recently described the scene as “wall to wall” — like “a day at Disneyland.”
An NPS spokesperson pushed back on those characterizations, telling Fox News Digital that overcrowding claims “are not an accurate characterization of current park operations” and that the park “experiences periods of high visitation, particularly around weather-dependent events and holiday weekends.”
Still, the backlash within the park’s own workforce has been notable. According to Outside magazine’s reporting, a March survey by the Yosemite Union found that 85 percent of 135 verified employee respondents disapproved of the decision, with more than 300 staff members publicly calling for it to be reversed. Those figures come from Outside’s reporting and could not be independently verified from primary documents.
Park advocates had raised alarms well before summer. When KQED reported on the policy change in February, operators and conservation groups expressed concern that officials were downplaying the likelihood of summer overcrowding. The National Parks Conservation Association has noted that Yosemite visitation rose more than 30% between 2000 and 2019.
Not all visitors have reported severe crowding, and conditions appear to vary across different sections of the 1,169-square-mile park and by day of the week. The Yosemite Conservancy recommends arriving before 7 a.m., visiting midweek or relying on bus transportation to reduce waits.
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