Yosemite Crowded With No Reservation System

Above, no long lines at a Yosemite entrance gate in the off-season. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

There is one big reason why I prefer visiting national parks during the off-season: no crowds!

It seems that in recent years (during and since the pandemic), more people are heading off to "get away from it all" at a national park with hordes of others. It is even worse during holiday weekends.

At least during the off-season, while there are people present, there isn't hordes of them. I had an enjoyable time in Yosemite National Park in April 2016. I made camping reservations months before and there were no crowds when I got there.

Above, no crowded viewpoint parking areas in Yosemite during the off-season. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

Unfortunately, as there is no reservation system in place to enter Yosemite, massive crowds and lines of cars were the result.

This presented a problem recently during the Juneteenth holiday weekend. Either people had to wait four hours to enter Yosemite and/or being turned away at the entrance gate.

From SFGATE: 

When friends and family visit John Stone and his wife, Sandy, at their home in Groveland, a gateway town about a 30-minute drive from Yosemite National Park, they like to bring their guests into the park. They’ve been doing this for upward of 40 years, and it’s always been enjoyable, Stone said, but all that changed over the Juneteenth holiday weekend.

Stone’s cousin and nephew were in town, and when the group tried to enter the park Saturday morning at 10 a.m., they couldn’t get in.

“It was stop and go, stop and go, stop and go,” Stone says of the wait at the Big Oak Flat entrance along Highway 120. “And finally, the cars coming back down the hill were waving at us, telling us that we had to turn around, that they were turning around people at the gate. So we didn’t stay in line any longer.”

 To read more, go here.