Several recent columns appearing in the San Francisco Chronicle and SF Gate criticize the decision to scrap Yosemite’s bureaucratic reservation system, attributing this to gridlock, parking shortages, entrance delays, mangled bears and plummeting morale.
To these critics, the ideal solution is the radical 1980 General Management plan. It would have ultimately banned all traffic from the park and required visitors to stop nearly 50 miles away, pack up the kids, the binkies, blankies and backpacks and then take a government bus more than an hour in order to set foot in the Valley.
They also favor the so-called Merced River Plan that sought to drastically reduce amenities available to park visitors.
Now they favor the reservation system that greatly inconvenienced park visitors in 2024. To them, these restrictive measures produced happy park rangers and happier bears.
Yet to the public, they meant that an average of 700 cars a day — filled with families who had driven hours to enjoy a day at Yosemite — were turned away at the gates for lack of reservations.
Meanwhile, inside the Valley, parking lots sat half empty. Hotel reservations fell thousands short and many tourists who booked a room outside the park were refused entry at the gates for lacking a reservation.
Clearly, the reservation system significantly suppressed what would otherwise have been a robust rebound in tourism following the covid closures. Strict daily reservations were imposed in July of 2024, and by August, year-over-year visitation declined 7.7 percent at a time it should have been rising. Visitor stops at the Mariposa visitor center dropped 10 percent.
Throughout all of 2024, 327,707 fewer visitors came to the park than the average of the four years preceding Covid.
Nor are the bears any worse off. A 1943 report put the Yosemite bear population at between 300 and 400. The most recent estimate puts it between 300 and 500.
This is not to say that crowding in the Valley hasn’t been a big problem — but the solution is better management, not restricting access. Today, there are only about half the parking spaces, rooms and campsites at Yosemite as were available to visitors prior to the 1997 flood.
Although Congress appropriated funds to restore this capacity, it never was. A succession of incompetent superintendents tolerated inefficient admissions and time-consuming transactions that often meant long lines at the gates.
Under Yosemite’s new superintendent, Ray McPadden, these deficiencies are finally being addressed. He is instituting a large number of improvements that have been advocated by the gateway communities for a decade, but that were haughtily ignored by park managers until now.
To address gate delays, he has introduced digitized entry passes and installed Wi-Fi to expedite admissions. To de-congest the valley, he is promoting and encouraging visitors to enjoy often overlooked features like Tuolumne Meadows, Mariposa Grove, Glacier Point and Tenaya Lake.
He is adding long-overdue additional parking and will be using real-time data this summer to relieve traffic congestion.
The Yosemite Grant Act of 1864 pledged that this natural masterpiece would be forever available to Americans for “public use, resort and recreation.” Today’s woke elitists would change that to “Look, but don’t touch.”
John Muir once wrote, “The valley is filled with people, yet they do not annoy me.”
Not so the green left, that has tried for many years to reduce visitor services and restrict public access. The 750,000-acre national park can welcome many more visitors than it does today.
All that has been lacking is a visitor-friendly attitude by Yosemite Park management and a willingness to be a good neighbor to the gateway communities and businesses that depend on tourism. With Yosemite’s new management, that day has finally come.
Congressman Tom McClintock represents California’s 5th Congressional District, including Yosemite.
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