BY REP. TOM MCCLINTOCK
Special to the Journal
The limited reservations requirement for Yosemite National Park announced by the Interior Department is a step in the right direction – away from the heavy restrictions that suppressed visitation and harmed the gateway communities that depend on tourism for their economic survival. I’m grateful to Secretary DougBurgum for listening to our concerns and acting on them. The compromise limits the reservations to certain weekends and arrivals between 6 am and 2 pm between June 15 and August 15. That cuts the restricted days by about a quarter and allows visitors without a reservation to enter the park at their convenience by early morning or mid- afternoon.
The Yosemite Grant Act of 1864 pledged that this natural masterpiece would be set aside for “public use, resort, and recreation.” As John Muir wrote, “The valley is filled with people, yet they do not annoy me.”
Yet they annoy the green left, and it has tried for many years to reduce visitor amenities and restrict access. Infuriating delays at the entrances and congestion during peak periods are real problems, to be sure, but limiting public access with heavy handed restrictions is a lousy answer.
In April of 2024, Yosemite began a reservation system on holidays and weekends, and one columnist noted that visits to the park went up that season. But if he had done a deeper dive into the data, he would have found that when the reservation system was extended to every day in the summer months, visitation declined from the prior year. In July it was down nominally but in August, visits declined 7.7 percent from the prior August -- when they should have been rising.
The 4.1 million visits to Yosemite in 2024 may have exceeded attendance in 2023, but scored well below prior years – indeed, about 228,000 visits below the pre-covid 5-year average. Because of the reservation system, locals report that an average of 700 cars were turned away every day while parking lots in the Valley were often only half-full.
The impact was even more pronounced in the gateway communities. Between May and October, stops at the Mariposa Visitor Center dropped more than ten percent from the prior year.
For gateway businesses, the reservations system discourages spontaneous visits from local and regional visitors who are most likely to stop in the gateway communities. Booking a hotel room outside the park is useless to a visitor if they are turned away at the entrance because they lacked a reservation.
Overcrowding in the Valley and intolerable waits at the entrances are a serious problem that gateway businesses have been unsuccessfully urging park management to address for years.
To de-congest entrances, community leaders have recommended expedited electronic entry, adapting additional lanes for entering the park during periods of high in-bound traffic, and locating information centers inside the park gates so that anyone with questions at the entrance can be immediately directed to them without holding up traffic.
To de-congest the valley, they have recommended promoting and encouraging visitors to frequent other parts of the park that aren't as crowded as the Valley, like Tuolumne Meadows, Mariposa Grove, Glacier Point and Tenaya Lake and re-design the Valley’s inefficient traffic patterns.
Prior to the 1997 flood, Yosemite offered roughly twice the rooms, campsites and parking as it does today. The park’s capacity was never replaced despite Congress appropriating funds for this purpose and repeated pleas from the gateway communities.
The 750,000-acre national park can welcome many more visitors than it does today without restricting access. All that is missing 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 the new administration and a search for a new park superintendent, perhaps that hour can finally come.
— Congressman Tom McClintock represents California’s 5th Congressional District
