Even before the summer travel rush began this Memorial Day weekend, Yosemite National Park was seeing enormous crowds—more than 836,000 visits so far in 2026, according to National Park Service data, about 100,000 more than this time last year.
During the pandemic, Yosemite started using some form of reservation system to manage crowds. Yosemite had one of its busiest seasons in 2025, with about 2.9 million visits through August, up 7% from the same period in 2024. Despite the high visitation rates, the National Park Service announced in February that Yosemite would not require timed-entry reservations in 2026, saying a review of 2025 traffic and parking data showed that a season-wide reservation requirement was not the most effective approach.
Last weekend, wait times to get into the park exceeded 90 minutes, and in some cases visitors were told to turn around. Once inside, visitors experienced completely full parking lots and overcrowding at popular sites within the park. Andranik Arakelyan, a visitor who previously opposed reservation systems acknowledged their value, saying, “There’s just not enough capacity, like infrastructure and the employees to handle all of this traffic.”
“Without any limits on the amount of vehicles, the amount of people, it becomes overwhelmed,” said John Buckley, Central Sierra Environmental Resource Center executive director. “The best accessibility is when there’s managed park conditions so that the number of vehicles is balanced with the amount of parking and the capacity of the roads,” said Buckley.
Quick hits
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Quote of the day
The Forest Service’s own assessment found that building roads in these areas would actually increase the risk of fire, and another analysis shows that 85% of wildfires are human-caused.”
—Representative Andrea Salinas of Oregon, WyoFile
Picture This
Waves shimmer beneath the cliffs of Channel Islands National Park, where golden wildflowers bloom brightly above the Pacific.
Have a peaceful Sunday!
Photo by Tim Hauf
Featured image: Source: Yosemitenps