The Chronicle has launched a new weekly Travel newsletter! Sign up here. Enter your email at the top and check the box marked “Travel.”

John Buckley has visited Yosemite more times than most will in a lifetime. As a young man, he remembers padding along the banks of the Merced River, which meanders through Yosemite Valley, the park’s main destination, with nary a soul in sight. “I used to go out there during springtime, and you could walk, and you’d see a person maybe every five or 10 minutes,” Buckley says.

To anyone who has visited the valley in recent years, the idea of an unencumbered stroll in the valley must seem like a quaint anachronism.

“Now it’s just a string of people on the trails and you’re walking right next to a line of cars on the road,” says Buckley, 69, executive director of Central Sierra Environmental Resource Center, a nonprofit group that works to protect and improve the Sierra Nevada environment. “It’s much less of a natural experience.”

Now Playing:

It’s no secret: We love national parks. And we’re visiting them in record numbers, in some cases stretching their resources and infrastructure beyond what was ever intended. The most prominent example may be Zion, where 4.5 million people swarmed the park’s relatively modest 146,597 acres last year — about twice the visitorship the park saw just 15 years earlier.

Visitors to Yosemite, which is one of the five most frequented national parks, hovered around 3.7 million people annually for the decade leading up to 2016, when the count spiked to upward of 5 million for the first time ever. (The number came back down to about 4.3 million last year; park officials are bracing for a crush of tourists this season.) The deluge of people — to Yosemite Valley specifically — has park officials anxious to find a release valve as summer approaches and the onslaught of cars and campers begins.

“We have to manage the experience and manage expectations,” says Yosemite spokesman Scott Gediman. “We realize that for a lot of people that either come from the U.S. and around the world, this is their one and only trip to the park. It’s incumbent upon us to protect that experience as much as we can.”

This isn’t the first time Yosemite officials have contemplated these problems or taken steps to curb crowding.

In fact, in the 1980s, the National Park Service backed off a plan it had initially approved to all but ban private vehicles and remove most buildings in the valley by 1990, much to the disappointment of conservationists. (At the time, the Park Service floated the idea of building a light-rail system “operated by 21st century technologies” to help reduce congestion.)

Trails around the valley are constantly being improved. For instance, the Yosemite Conservancy and the national park service are jointly funding a multiyear $13 million project at Bridalveil Fall this year. Several years ago, the park revamped the loop trail to Yosemite Falls, one of the shorter and easier trails in the park that leads to one of the most famous features, making it easier for people to get there (and easier to leave). In 2010, officials instituted a permitting system to ease pileups on the notoriously jam-packed hiking route up Half Dome after four people slipped and fell to their deaths. (No one has died on the hike since the permit system took effect.)

In 2015, after seven years of negotiations among the Park Service, local business leaders and other stakeholders, the park adopted the Merced Wild and Scenic River Final Comprehensive Management Plan and Environmental Impact Statement. It’s a long, exhaustive list of analyses, allowances, prohibitions and user limits.

Back to Gallery Yosemite Valley is under siege from tourists. Can it be... 46 1 of 46 Photo: Courtesy National Park Service 2 of 46 3 of 46 4 of 46 5 of 46 Photo: Gary Fong, San Francisco Chronicle 6 of 46 7 of 46 8 of 46 Photo: Steve Ringman, San Francisco Chronicle 9 of 46 10 of 46 Photo: Chronicle archives 11 of 46 12 of 46 Photo: Deanne Fitzmaurice, San Francisco Chronicle 13 of 46 Photo: Michael Maloney, San Francisco Chronicle 14 of 46 Photo: Chronicle archives 15 of 46 Photo: Deanne Fitzmaurice, San Francisco Chronicle 16 of 46 Photo: Liz Hafalia, San Francisco Chronicle 17 of 46 Photo: Eric Luse, San Francisco Chronicle 18 of 46 Photo: Chronicle archives 19 of 46 Photo: Deanne Fitzmaurice, San Francisco Chronicle 20 of 46 Photo: Courtesy of Standard Oil Company 21 of 46 Photo: Chronicle archives 22 of 46 Photo: C Miller 23 of 46 24 of 46 Photo: Scott Sommerdorf, San Francisco Chronicle 25 of 46 Photo: Santa Fe Railway 26 of 46 Photo: Chronicle archives 27 of 46 Photo: C. Miller 28 of 46 Photo: John O'Hara, San Francisco Chronicle 29 of 46 Photo: Gary Fong, San Francisco Chronicle 30 of 46 Photo: Chronicle archives 31 of 46 32 of 46 Photo: Chronicle archives 33 of 46 Photo: Chronicle archives 34 of 46 Photo: Steve Ringman, San Francisco Chronicle 35 of 46 36 of 46 Photo: Chronicle archives 37 of 46 38 of 46 39 of 46 40 of 46 Photo: Chronicle archives 41 of 46 Photo: Chronicle archives 42 of 46 Photo: Chronicle archives 43 of 46 Photo: Chronicle archives 44 of 46 Photo: Chronicle archives 45 of 46 Photo: Chronicle archives 46 of 46 Photo: Chronicle archives



























































































Included is a plan to cap the number of people in Yosemite Valley at 20,100 per day (and set a limit of 18,710 people at any given time) to foster “an enhanced ‘sense of arrival’” among visitors who may be opening their car doors beneath the park’s magnificent granite monoliths for the first time. Other provisions call for increasing day use parking in the valley, boosting the number of campsites and lodging units, and reducing traffic congestion.

Whether there has been meaningful progress toward those goals is up for debate.

Upward of 8,000 cars and a potential 23,000 tourists — well above the established user limit — have been counted in the valley on summer days in recent years. Horror stories of two-hour traffic standstills are common among anyone who has tried getting into the park on a sunny Saturday. (There’s actually a new term for the scenario of sitting in standstill traffic in popular natural settings: greenlock.) Chalk the cause up to whatever you like: Instagram-loving Millennials, legions of retiring Baby Boomers or hyped-up, state-funded national park promotional campaigns.

On a recent trip to Yosemite, Buckley found himself bumper-to-bumper on Highway 120 coming into the park’s west entrance. When he finally got to the valley, he couldn’t find a parking space and wound up cutting his day trip short. “That is simply irresponsible park management,” he wrote in an email. “To charge people and to allow them to enter Yosemite, but not to inform them that there are no available parking spaces, is just not right.”

Last summer, the park started offering reservations on 150 parking spaces in the valley. But what happened, Gediman says, is drivers who had reservations would swoop into whichever parking spaces were available wherever they wanted to go. “We had spaces we had to keep empty all day” for people who reserved them but never showed, Gediman says. And in other places in the valley, people would just double-park. A traffic roundabout installed at the eastern end of the valley hasn’t helped much either.

Pundits and former park officials have floated the idea of hard-capping the number of tourists allowed in certain national parks — as much for the health of the land as the user experience.

“These are irreplaceable resources,” Joan Anzelmo, a retired Park Service superintendent, told Yale University’s online magazine Yale Environment 360 last year. “We have to protect them by putting some strategic limits on numbers, or there won’t be anything left.”

This summer, the goal at Yosemite is to begin to ascertain, with precision, where tourists are going, what they’re doing, when, and for how long.

“We’re trying to analyze the way people are visiting the park,” Gediman says. “We want to look at use patterns for people.”

For instance, on certain weekends, park officials will halt traffic on Highway 140, one of the two main arteries Bay Area travelers take into the park’s west side, and release cars incrementally to spread out motorists.

Random visitors will be asked upon arrival to carry a GPS unit with them during the course of their stay. That information will go to the national park service.

“There can’t be a lot of infrastructure changes — it wouldn’t be appropriate in Yosemite,” says Frank Dean, president of the Yosemite Conservancy, which funds park improvements and has taken an interest in understanding the tangle of activity in the valley.

“You don’t build your way out of this challenge, you manage it.”

Gediman, however, says the park won’t ever be able to manage away crowding and gridlock. “The solution isn’t all on us; it’s going to have to come from how visitors come here and use the place.”

Another element of the Park Service’s overall strategy involves posting suggestions for planning a valley visit. They cover what you might expect: Come early. Leave late. Make campsite reservations in advance. “Pack your patience.” But of course there’s no secret formula for outmaneuvering the millions-strong blitz of valley visitors — although some have tried concocting one.

Last year, a San Francisco engineer and rock climber, looking for a workaround to the tedious trial-and-error process of claiming a campsite on www.recreation.gov, wrote a computer script that scraped the system for campsite cancellations and availability at Yosemite. (It’s since been copied several times, making one wonder whether sharing it publicly negated its intended purpose.)

All this raises the question of what we want and what is reasonable to expect from our national parks. It’s the question Gediman carries with him every day at work: how to balance serving the public and preserving the wild.

It’s unlikely that the experience of visiting Yosemite is in for any revolutionary changes any time soon. What’s clear is this: If you want to avoid the mess, steer clear of the valley. If you’re hoping for a natural experience in the most popular place in the park, you need to recalibrate your expectations.

“People need to understand,” Gediman says, “that they’re not going to get a wilderness experience in Yosemite Valley.”

Gregory Thomas is regional and local travel editor at The Chronicle. Email: gthomas@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @GregRThomas

Lose yourself — and everyone else

“Yosemite Valley represents less than 5 percent of the park, but it’s where well over 90 percent of visitors go,” says Yosemite spokesman Scott Gediman. The park encompasses more than 748,000 acres, and yet the vast majority of its millions of visitors are drawn to that little buzzing sliver of traffic snarls, selfie sticks and, now, a Starbucks. If you’re willing to venture beyond the valley, it’s easy enough to put some distance between yourself and the masses and find the oft-stunning, if less-hyped, pieces of the park. Those who do are apt to find a more peaceful and fulfilling nature experience. Here are three hikes to get you started.

Hetch Hetchy Valley

In one of his screeds condemning the proposed O’Shaughnessy Dam, John Muir exalted Hetch Hetchy Valley to church-level status, stating that “no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man.” Today, it makes for a laid-back respite from the park’s more popular valley. For a day hike, take the relatively flat foot path around the reservoir to the picturesque Wapama Falls (5.5 miles out and back), or continue all the way to the soothingly loud cascades of Rancheria Falls (13 miles out and back). The Rancheria Falls trailhead (which passes Wapama) starts at the dam.

Pro tip: Bring a water filter and tap San Francisco’s water supply at the source — from the falls, not the reservoir.

www.yosemitehikes.com/hetch-hetchy/rancheria-falls/rancheria-falls

Mono Pass

Moderate; out and back; 8 miles; 900 feet of elevation gain

On the eastern edge of the park is this gem of a hike, which doesn’t attract the same level of attention as hikes that start in Tuolumne Meadows. The trail takes you above Mono Lake and its famous tufas; once you hit the pass, go about a quarter mile farther and you’ll arrive at a shelf overlooking both Mono and Upper Sardine lakes. Start: Just inside the Tioga Pass entrance along Highway 120 is the Mono Pass trailhead (it’s easy to spot from the road).

Pro tip: If you’re heading out from the Bay Area, make sure Tioga Road is open before you go!

www.yosemitehikes.com/tioga-road/mono-pass/mono-pass

Chilnualna Falls

Moderate: out and back; 8.4 miles; 2,300 feet of elevation gain

The Mist Trail gets all the attention, which has kept this awesome trail under the radar. But with several falls along the route and a 50-foot cascade at the end, Chilnualna Falls is worth the trip. About 5 miles into the park’s southern entrance on Highway 41, you’ll spot the Wawona Hotel (now called Big Trees Lodge); drive across the bridge over the Merced River and take a right on Chilnualna Falls Road. The trailhead parking lot is 1.5 miles up the road.

Pro tip: Go in late spring, when flows are high and the falls are surging.

www.yosemitehikes.com/southern-yosemite/chilnualna-falls/chilnualna-falls