New Visitor Quotas Keep Yosemite Open For All Overcrowding Is A Major Problem In Yosemite National Park - The New Superintendent Hopes Her Changes Will Be For The Better

Everybody wants to get into heaven, but a new gatekeeper is changing the lock.

Heaven in this case is Yosemite National Park, and the gatekeeper is Park Superintendent B.J. Griffin. She is making the first significant attempts in history to enforce visitor quotas and keep the environment as pristine as possible.

“What I would hope for this park one day is a very quiet experience,” Griffin said. “Get the noise down. Certainly no more congestion. I have a lot of problems with sounds, buses, our own trucks, delivery vehicles, not only the automobiles.

“I go out and walk my dog at 6 o’clock in the morning, and all I hear are birds and waterfalls. Certainly by the time I walk over here (the park office) by 7:30 or so, it’s all changed.”

That’s because people are arriving in record numbers: 4.1 million last year, and a daily parade this summer to see Yosemite Valley and its waterfall extravaganza at a peak from the melt-off of the highest snowpack ever documented. In the race to find a parking spot, the crowds are turning nature’s greatest show on Earth into a three-ring circus.

But Griffin, appointed as park superintendent last February, is drawing a line.

Since Memorial Day weekend, the entrances to Yosemite have been closed 11 times, the most in the park’s history, turning away more than 10,000 vehicles. By comparison, last year, when park visitation was the highest ever documented, the gates were never closed, with cars, RVs and buses still pouring in even though every parking space in the entire park was already filled.

The new restrictions are just a start, she says, in a mission “to reorganize the park to a very manageable, pleasant experience.”

The mission includes a plan to virtually eliminate automobile traffic from Yosemite Valley by establishing a staging area outside the park and transporting visitors to locations by means of a narrow and quiet light rail system. It includes requiring reservations for day-use visitors, an enormous undertaking, in order to give all people an equal chance to see Yosemite Valley.

Griffin also supports the drive to move permanent residences from the valley to outside park boundaries at El Portal for all but emergency personnel, and to reduce the impact of extremely crowded campgrounds and resorts.

Griffin says the changes will have a profound effect on the park experience, to the point where she hopes the short, easy hikes to Yosemite Falls, Bridalveil Falls and the base of El Capitan will be transformed from a parade into a chance at divine moments in nature’s temple.

“I’d like to see the West Valley inviting for people who want the solitude,” Griffin said. “If they want to walk a trail without walking into development or crowds, I think I’d like to see that happen. … It will be reorganized to a very manageable, pleasant experience.”

But while the visitor quotas that Griffin has recently implemented have called out “enough is enough,” by the time the gates are closed more than 20,000 people are already crowding into a few miles in the valley. That many people in that small a space limit the chances of a short, quiet walk or camping trip.

The “trail” to Mirror Lake at the base of Half Dome, where John Muir once sought counsel with heaven, consists of a two-lane paved road where bicyclists use a wall of walkers as a slalom course. The walks to the base of Lower Yosemite Falls and Bridalveil Falls, two of the most spectacular waterfalls in the world, are as paved and crowded like a line leading to a popular ride in a theme park. In fact, it seems that most of the park is designed as an automobile tour, with the best hiking trails located more than an hour’s drive from the valley.

Meanwhile, the campgrounds are full around the clock - what some people call “combat camping” with tents and motor homes often less than 5 feet apart. The housekeeping cabins, made of concrete with a draw on one side, may be the ugliest lodging in any national park in America.

No matter where you stay, the sights and sounds of intense auto traffic are within close range. During peak use, it can take a half-hour to drive a mile amid the traffic near the Village Store.

“The visitor experience is something that I guard very jealously,” Griffin said. “That’s why crowds bother me as much as they do. It’s not so much a resource issue as it is the quality of the experience that the visitor deserves. I want them to walk away from here thinking their lives have been changed a little bit.”

The fastest way to solve problems, Griffin says, is to establish a day-use reservation system. Alaska’s Denali National Park has such a system, though visitors are taken into Denali only by bus.

“We’re indeed looking at that very seriously for implementation in the next five years,” she said. “That would be a lot easier to manage. You get your reservation before you come, and you know you are going to get in here. You’re not going to get stopped at the gate. We have to look at a day-use reservation system.”

An even more ambitious plan, the “long-range solution,” according to Griffin, is to implement some sort of “people mover.” Visitors would park their vehicles outside Yosemite boundaries, then be transported.

“If you could use light rail, it’s quiet, it doesn’t take up much lane space, and you could still allow cars to drive in if they had reservations,” Griffin said. “To me, that looks like the best of all worlds.”

But it always gets back to one thing interfering with what can be a transcendent experience: people.

“When you look at these granite walls and waterfalls, and think about how many drops of water come over those cliffs, there is a timelessness of the place,” Griffin said. “It can give you an insight of where you fit into all of this, which is not but a little blip on a screen. It puts your life into complete perspective.”