Park superintendent shrugs off matter of overcrowding

Here come the crowds.

By 7:50 a.m. last Saturday morning the parking lot in Curry Village was full.

By 10:51 a.m. all parking in Yosemite Valley was packed. Same for Hetch Hetchy an hour later.

Welcome to Saturday morning in Yosemite National Park.

And it’s not even officially summer yet.

YNP Superintendent Ray McPadden doesn’t believe anyone should be surprised.

“Saturdays are really busy in the park, and then other days are fine,” McPadden said last week, shrugging off national headlines that have referenced a “free for all” and chaos in the park, with hour and a half delays at the South Gate Entrance.

McPadden expected the opening of Glacier Point last Saturday to relieve some of the congestion, as well as Tioga Pass opening some time in mid-May.

But he suggested that visitors who are crowd adverse should come to the park during the week, or consider taking YARTS or a chartered tour.

In February, McPadden made the controversial decision not to have a vehicle reservation system during the summer tourism season.

Plans are underway for a customer satisfaction survey of summer visitors that will ask about entrance lines and overall experience, he said.

McPadden wants the survey to be “scientific” and “real social science,” something he believes has been lacking in previous assessments.

“I think one of the weaknesses with hyper restrictive reservation systems is we never really asked the public how their experience was in a scientific way, or a defensible way,” McPadden said.

McPadden dismissed activist groups that have a particular idea of “what the park experience should be like.”

“But that’s not necessarily what everybody wants,” he said.

He claimed there is no evidence overcrowding has damaged the park’s ecology.

Conservationists bristled at McPadden’s remarks, first published online last week by the Mariposa Gazette.

Beth Pratt, a conservation leader, author and wildlife advocate said, “McPadden seems to have lost his way.”

“He has been entrusted with managing one of the most special places on the planet yet his metrics of success, instead of conserving for those future generations, appears to be filling ‘lots of space’ with more and more visitors as if Yosemite was an amusement park,” Pratt wrote in an email to the Gazette.

Pratt, who has lived just outside Yosemite for 30 years, said McPadden is wrong about “zero evidence” of an ecological impact from overcrowding.

‘There is decades of rigorous scientific study showing that Yosemite has a carrying capacity, and the impacts of overcrowding on the wildlife, the landscape and the visitor experience,” Pratt said.

Pratt pointed to studies in 2014 of the Merced River and the 2024 Yosemite Visitor Access Management and Environmental Assessment.

Mark Rose, senior Sierra Nevada Program Manager for the National Parks Conservation Association, said McPadden’s decision to forgo the vehicle reservation system ignores decades of research.

“Rarely, if ever, has Yosemite faced such a crisis,” Rose said.

“Claims by Superintendent McPadden that there has not been any ‘real social science’ done to gauge the public’s experience are unequivocally false,” Rose said in a statement to the Gazette.

The National Park Service has an entire web page dedicated to research and surveys about the visitor experience in Yosemite National Park, with links to four visitor surveys and five studies conducted between 2005 and 2019.

Several of those studies looked at visitor perceptions of crowding, wait times and levels of service.

Rose cited a recent union survey of Yosemite employees that show the vast majority opposed eliminating vehicle reservations.

It is a point McPadden would likely concede.

“The people who live here and work here tend to be much more sensitive, to lines and all that stuff. So we, the park service, perceive some huge catastrophic problem,” McPadden said.

But if you ask the visitor, he said, they will say, “I’m having a great time. No problem. What are you talking about?”

McPadden said if traffic problems this summer become more serious, or approach any kind of gridlock, he is prepared to “shunt” traffic in the valley at El Capitan Road, diverting people to less populated areas like the Mariposa Grove, Wawona and Tuolumne Meadows.

The ability of emergency services to quickly access areas of the park will be an important factor in making that decision, he said.

Visitor numbers in Yosemite have been on a bit of roller coaster this year due in part to an unseasonably warm spring.

According to attendance numbers from the National Park Service, visits to Yosemite were up 45 percent in March from the prior year.

But in April, the number of total visits was down 5 percent.

Year to date through April 30, visits to Yosemite were up 10 percent overall, with 813,835 visitors to the park.

The busy season is still ahead.

“I’m expecting visitation to go up. We have lots of space for people to have a good time,” McPadden said.

Last year, nearly 4.3 million people visited the park, a post pandemic record.