Yosemite scrapped its reservation system for 2026. It hasn’t been without issue

Yosemite National Park launched an entrance reservation system in 2020 as a means of crowd control for the record level of visitors that were streaming into the Sierra Nevada landmark amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

In the ensuing years, the system was used, periodically, to mitigate overcrowding at its most popular locales (mostly in the Yosemite Valley) until the park service eliminated that system for 2026.

This triggered massive gridlock, wildlife and safety concerns, and calls from two California senators to bring the system back.

Here’s what to know:

• Yosemite began using reservations in 2020 to cap visitor numbers during the COVID-19 pandemic. But the park had been dealing with rising attendance for decades. Annual visits doubled from 1980s to the ’90s, when they stood at 4 million.
• Park administrators approved a permanent reservation system in December 2024 only to institute a scaled-back version of that system the following year. The new system required reservations from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m., only. This produced afternoon surges of vehicles, overflowing parking lots and damage to sensitive meadow ecosystems, as visits through August hit 2,919,722 — a 7% increase over the previous summer.
• In February, the park announced it would no longer require vehicle reservations at all. This reversed a three-year policy that had protected popular spots like the so-called Horsetail “firefall,” which saw crowds trampling meadows and eroding riverbanks each February. The park service said analyzed data from 2025 showed available parking and stable traffic flow on most weekdays. Arches National Park and Glacier National Park also lifted their timed-entry rules in February.
• Critics of the move, like the Friends of Yosemite Search and Rescue, warned it would reverse crowding gains made since 2020 and predicted capacity saturation in Yosemite Valley, the Glacier Point corridor and Mariposa Grove during peak weekends and holidays.
• Which is what happened. Visitation jumped as much as 45% in March and by May the park saw hours-long entrance lines and gridlocked parking near El Capitan and Half Dome — conditions advocates described as “pure chaos for visitors.”
• The problems were exacerbated by the Trump administration’s firing of roughly 1,000 National Park Service workers in 2025 and the temporary freezing of several seasonal positions, which critics said left the national parks, including Yosemite, understaffed heading into the busy 2026 travel season.
• In a letter sent just before the Fourth of July weekend, Senators Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff urged Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Acting Park Service Director Jessica Bowron to reinstate the reservation system, “should the 2026 peak season become too burdensome for the Park.” The senators said they were “deeply concerned about how the Park will be able to manage visitation safely and effectively protect park resources during the peak summer months.”

The above summaries were compiled with the help of AI tools and edited the reporter. The source reporting is original content, was written and edited entirely by journalists.