YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK, Calif. — On Saturday, May 2, the park’s parking lots looked apocalyptic during the first major weekend of a season with no entry limits. Cars were squeezed between trees and rocks, up onto curbs and into the dirt on both sides of the road.
On a 500-foot walk to the Lodge shuttle stop, five separate drivers flagged the writer down to ask whether the writer was leaving the lot. The shuttle itself was trapped by an illegally parked car that was being loaded onto a tow truck, while two more tow trucks removed other cars parked at odd angles in the same lot. Along the roadside, the line of vehicles stretched for the full 1.8-mile run from Camp 4 to the El Cap picnic area, and every driver parked there was breaking the rules.
The scene made visible what park managers have spent years trying to control with reservation systems. Yosemite officials ran timed-entry experiments for five years before a federal order overrode them. The park drew 4.42 million visitors in 2019, its highest total since records began in 1906, and after the park shut down for three months in 2020, administrators introduced the first version of its reservation system to help contain the spread of COVID-19.
Day-use reservations were required for most visitors in 2020 and 2021. In 2022, Yosemite moved to a peak-hours system for entrants between 6 A.M. and 4 P.M. each day. The following year, it temporarily dropped reservations except for the last three weekends of February, when the park typically gets slammed for Firefall. A 224-page National Park Service report later said the 2023 season brought long lines at entrance stations and added strain on the park’s employees, resources and infrastructure.
A 2023 survey found that 51 percent of visitors said parking shortages affected their trip negatively, while 26 percent said the same about crowding at restrooms and visitor centers. Officials brought entry limits back in 2024 and 2025 in a more limited form, with summer reservations required every day and only on weekends in the truncated text that follows, but the May 2 crush showed how quickly Yosemite National Park visitor congestion returns when those limits are relaxed. For travelers, the question is not whether the park can fill up. It is whether the next round of controls will arrive before the roads do.
