Return of Yosemite busy season, with pandemic limits
Yosemite National Park will begin its busy spring and summer season with more open campgrounds, more available hotel rooms and more dining spots than last year. There’s even a newly revamped bar and pizza place opening next month.
Still, visitors to Yosemite shouldn’t expect a return to normal anytime soon. Amid the lingering pandemic, park officials are planning to have fewer staff and limited services, and they haven’t ruled out caps on park admission and requiring reservations for entry, as they did last summer.
Officials have already decided that park shuttles won’t run, some campgrounds and
hotels won’t open and the internationally famed High Sierra Camps will remain closed. Visitor centers also will be dark, though rangers will staff outdoor information kiosks and be present at major attractions. Additionally, masks will remain a requirement indoors and on heavily trafficked trails, and occupancy in shops and dining areas will be limited to allow for social distancing.
“Summer operations will definitely have a modified stance, as they did last year,” Yosemite spokesperson Scott Gediman said. “We’re continuing to monitor conditions and look at things at a regional level and that will guide what we do . ... But it’s our goal to offer as many services to visitors as we can.”
Yosemite is a pillar of the National Park Service. The granite domes, towering waterfalls and snowcapped peaks attract more than 4 million people each year, though last year attendance dropped by more than a third because of the pandemic.
The policies park officials choose to enact in the coming months will affect countless vacation plans as well as the economies of the many gateway communities, including Mariposa and Oakhurst (Madera County), where hotels, restaurants and souvenir shops live or die by park visitors.
Conservation groups, meanwhile, are expressing concerns about reopening parks too quickly after the pandemic, noting that the nation’s wildlands could be overwhelmed — and damaged — without adequate staffing and services in place, like restrooms. Health officials worry about the virus spreading in crowded areas.
One of the biggest obstacles at Yosemite has been providing COVIDsafe housing for seasonal employees. The temporary staff makes up a large part of the park’s workforce, often living in tight quarters within the park. To limit possible transmission of the virus, both the park service and the park’s concessionaire, Aramark, are planning to reduce the number of people in park housing, which means hiring fewer people. Neither has said what their staffing levels will be.
The employee cuts, though, will be apparent in shorter hours at shops and restaurants, and they’re part of the reason other amenities are being cut, including campgrounds and shuttle buses, which typically carry a few million people around Yosemite Valley each year.
Last June, to prevent crowds from overwhelming the reduced staff and services, park officials limited admission to Yosemite. Through September, visitors were required to obtain advance reservations to enter the park. The policy was briefly reintroduced in February to lessen traffic during the popular Firefall, a wintertime display of sunlight against a waterfall on the valley wall.
Gediman, with the park service, said it hasn’t been decided whether dayuse reservations would be needed again. But the possibility is triggering debate.
Businesses near Yosemite say they need to know soon so they can make plans for hiring employees and ordering supplies. They’ve generally been critical of caps on admission.
“It is extremely difficult for our economy, businesses and individuals to plan for summer operations outside the park without knowing what limitations will be in the park,” said Jonathan Farrington, executive director of the Yosemite Mariposa County Tourism Bureau.
The National Parks Conservation Association, which advocates for park protections, has called for Yosemite to revive the dayuse reservation policy.
“If the park service goes back to preCOVID business as usual by allowing hours of traffic jams and uncontrolled overcrowding, then it is failing the public and its mission to protect our natural and cultural resources,” said Mark Rose, a program manager for the organization.
Park officials say they’ll continue to weigh the many considerations, and try to strike a balance, as they plan. They emphasize that visitor policies are bound to change as the pandemic warrants.
“There’s all the unknowns of visitation and public health conditions,” Gediman said.
As it stands now, the park’s commercial operations are generally tied to the limits observed in surrounding communities, primarily Mariposa County, which recently moved into the state’s orange tier, the secondleastrestrictive. Under this classification, shops, restaurants and hotels can operate with modifications.
Most of the businesses in Yosemite Valley are open, including the Ahwahnee Hotel and Yosemite Valley Lodge. The Wawona Hotel is expected to open this summer while the Tuolumne Meadows Lodge and White Wolf Lodge are closed for the season. Next month, remodeled Curry Village is scheduled to debut with two upgraded spaces, Bar 1899 and Pizza Deck.
“We continue to follow public health (guidelines) and determine what we can open,” said David Sloma, regional vice president for Aramark’s leisure division. “Very much like last year, it will be a rollercoaster ride having to be flexible and adaptable.”