Yosemite Park Management

California Megadrought

SCOTT GEDIMAN  We first hit 4 million visitors in 1996, 20 years ago – the first year I got to Yosemite. Then our visitations started going down. The Merced River flooded in January of 1997, which had a huge impact on the park. People talked about it as a disaster – but it wasn’t a disaster. It was a disaster to the infrastructure; but a flood is a natural event, and it did much good. It gave us the impetus and the opportunity to implement many projects. After the Flood of 1997, the park was closed for 3-1/2 months.

Lodge rooms were washed away. Campgrounds and roads were impacted. The flood really gave allowed us to pause before going ahead. After the flood, visitors annual dropped from 4.1 million to 3.7 million. About 7 or 8 years ago, we were down to 3.3 million visitors. But we’re not trying to increase visitation or get as many people as possible. Our Mission is to preserve and protect the parks and provide good visitor experiences. Visit numbers are useful for us as barometers—how many people are visiting and what type of people are visiting—and they also help in our management decisions.

Visitation has dropped to 3.7 to 3.8 million. We had been down to about 3.3 million, and then 5 or 6 years ago we started on the upward trend to 3.7 million for many reasons. I tracked these visitation trends very closely. Much of the international visitation that had dropped off started coming back. We started seeing more visitors from Japan,  Korea and European destinations. Folks from Germany and England started coming back more. We saw more of the emerging markets—China, Brazil, India. Then 2 years ago we went back to 4.1 million again, and last year about 4.2 million.

This year is already a record year. We’re at 4.3 million, and just in September. We estimate 4.8 million for this year, The centennial prompted much excitement. It’s wonderful, but there are challenges of moving people and getting people in. Every park is different. Zion National Park instituted a shuttle a few years ago to get into the canyon I went with my family a couple of years ago and think the do a good job, 

Each of the 413 National Park units across the country are a bit different. Thus, the shuttle idea at Zion isn’t as conducive here for people coming into and out of the park since they use the park as a throughway. We always like to say, “Look, Yosemite is not a throughway for going one place to another,” but people use it as that. For example, people in the San Francisco Bay Area go to Lake Tahoe, for example, via the park on Highway 120. We’re also a big part of the circuit for many commercial tours. They come here on crazy 3-day tours from LA to see Yosemite, San Francisco, Monterey, and Napa in 3 days! We get many of those. 

On a busy day, we’ll get 60 to 70 tour buses here a day. Many people come through, stay here for an hour or two, take a photo, maybe have lunch at the Ahwahnee Hotel, and then leave. A visitation may not be long, but since we do get many folks here, we have young people doing traffic control, since traffic can be impeded over at Yosemite Falls. Our rangers literally out there directing traffic. Here at the Camp 6 – the day use area gets real impacted. Since we get many cars, we suggest people either come real early in the morning or late in the afternoon. We figure 6,000 cars come per day – that’s 18,000 people. We start managing it when we get up to 7,000 cars for the day. This year July 3rd was our busiest day, with over 8,000 cars in one day. 

We always recommend public transportation. YARTS – the Yosemite Area Regional Transportation System – is great, so we subsidize YARTS. This past year they came up from Fresno, given that almost all the major entrances are served by YARTS. Thus, we are encouraging people to use public transportation – and  to avoid the mid part of the day. We’re doing this, but when we’re getting the 6,000, 7,000, 8,000 cars, we’re getting to a point where you just don’t have places to park them.

Our goal, of course, is to get people parked, and then either on a bicycle, on a hiking trail, on a shuttle bus, or such. It’s interesting that I could remember coming in here as a kid and staying over at the Yosemite Lodge cabins. Our thing as a kid was to get the car from Yosemite Lodge, come over here, park at Stoneman Meadow, hang out, and people would drive around. And we haven’t made it forbidden, but it’s our goal to get people to drive in, park, and then take the shuttle bus or walk, So to that end, we’ve set up the Merced River Plan to help with parking. Clearly, Yosemite Valley must remain protected as precious land.

This is the centennial – the 100th anniversary – of the National Park Service; and last year, 2015, was the 125th anniversary of the Yosemite National Park. and 2014 was the 150th anniversary of the Yosemite Valley grant, whereby on June 30, 1864, President Lincoln signed the bill that set it aside to grow as a forest reserve.  We like to say this was the birth of the National Park idea – the whole concept of land to be preserved for all time, for all people, where everybody would have access. The Yosemite grant was based here in Yosemite Valley, Mariposa Grove and among the giant Sequoias.

As we go through all this planning, which is part of my job in public affairs, people ask, “Hey, why don’t you build parking garages like they do at shopping malls?” or “Why don’t you have more parking here?” It’s a balancing act. Maybe eventually we’ll eliminate cars, but it’s not our plan right now. But if we’re going to get these vehicles in, we must get them parked and improve the traffic circulation. So, a lot of this road construction you’re seeing is implementing the Merced River Plan and increasing the traffic flow. Our main day-use parking area, called Camp 6, is closed now. It’s very close to the river, so we’re moving it away from the river to allow some river restoration – and we’ll make it more organized with a nice restroom instead of a trailer. We’ll have a bus stop there and then build a traffic roundabout that people driving in—and the whole idea for the roundabout will accommodate thousands of vehicles in our busy midday time. Another change will be to address congestion around Yosemite Falls where you go over the Humpback Bridge as you’re leaving the park. We’ll build a pedestrian underpass where the road goes up, and then visitors can walk underneath the road to get to the Falls.

The ice rink, which was a controversial part of the river plan, is closed. We will bring in a temporary ice rink this winter  right out here in the parking lot. We’ll demolish the concessionary, Yosemite Hospitality, and reconfigure that parking lot, for an arrival area. Over the next several years, the project will address issues of more traffic, parking and circulation. The visitors’ center the first thing you look for on arrival. Now, people driving in get directed to this day-use parking area and have no idea where they are.