YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK – This is for all the procrastinators out there, aimlessly lugging around tents, sleeping bags and two-burner stoves.

Campers such as Elise Adcock and Austin Traut, who decided to make the trek from Orange County to Yosemite Valley for Memorial Day weekend.

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Yosemite bears: Track their movements online They arrived at 4 a.m. with grand designs on a precious site at Camp 4, the campground that attracts the rock climbing crowd. The austere campground has shared walk-in sites available for 210 people on a first-come, first-served basis.

The inspired campers barely missed the cut upon arrival. Which was why they lined up again some 12 hours later after an arduous 7½-mile hike to the top of Yosemite Falls. This time, they hoped to snag one of the 28 spots that rangers expected to open the next morning.

“It was our only option,” said Adcock, who is doing her residency at UC Irvine’s School of Medicine. “We planned this too late.”

She and Traut waited for the ranger to leave the registration kiosk at 5 p.m. to set out sleeping bags, ground cover and boil water for noodles. Park officials don’t allow campers to start the queue until their day ends.

Also, sleeping outside a designated campsite is prohibited, meaning the growing overnight crowd was supposed to remain awake all evening. Adcock and Traut set aside a bottle of Wild Turkey for the long night in which campers-in-waiting line up as if this were a major rock concert.

In a way, it is. After a drought-busting winter, Yosemite Valley has been providing a daily spectacle of spray-blasting waterfalls, lush meadows teeming with wildflowers and those godly white granite rock walls. Showtime starts at dawn, every day.

Getting a seat in the natural amphitheater is difficult for those who don’t plan five months ahead when campsite reservations open. The park offers 1,500 front-country sites at 13 locations, half of which are reservation only. The popular Valley has 379 reserved sites.

Those arriving without reservations?

“If you can get in the line at Camp 4 at 2 in the morning you might get a spot,” said Dani Julien of Friends of Yosemite Search and Rescue. “Otherwise, good luck.”

We checked in with a handful of camping experts for guidance on how to get last-minute sites at Yosemite. The rundown:

WITHOUT RESERVATIONS

It’s a bit like heading into the unknown. The park has seven campgrounds offering first-come, first-served options. Only Camp V is located in the Valley. The other six are closed much of the year because of snow at higher elevations. When open, White Wolf off Tioga Road and Bridalveil Creek off Glacier Point Road are conveniently located, and not terribly far from the Valley.

Park officials, however, are advising walk-ups to stay away until late July or August because the non-reserved campgrounds outside the Valley won’t open until then.

WHAT ARE THE ALTERNATIVES?

“There is no magic bullet if you miss lottery day,” said Ian Elman, president and co-founder of Southern Yosemite Mountain Guides.

He knows the landscape after 27 years of guiding visitors throughout the park. For the last-second planner, Elman recommends searching for national forest campgrounds that lie outside Yosemite.

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On the northern end, check the Stanislaus National Forest for sites off of Highway 120. The Merced River Recreation Area off of Highway 140 offers options before the Arch Rock Entrance into Yosemite. Elam also suggests checking for sites at the Bass Lake area near the park’s southern entrance.

“If you’re a 20-something and comfortable rolling in and doing some rough camping, you could go and camp,” said Elam, who grew up in Palo Alto and lives in Santa Cruz.

Visitors who prefer some luxury — you know, a bathroom and picnic table — better plan ahead.

AWAY FROM THE CROWDS

Those with strong legs and equally capable lungs might consider backcountry camping. But it turns out wilderness permits are in as high of demand as campground reservations.

Park rangers issued 29,300 wilderness permits last year, leading to more than 70,000 visitors hiking and camping in the backcountry.

The randomness of getting a permit led sisters Margaret and Mary Taylor to a state of joy when bagging the final two passes to camp above Yosemite Falls. Their entire Memorial Day weekend trip had come together miraculously. They checked every day for two consecutive weeks before getting a reserved site at Wawona Campground at the southern end of the park. On the way to their site, they stopped by the wilderness permit office just for the heck of it. Two permits were available.

“This is good karma,” said Mary Taylor, a Colorado landscape architect.

GAMING THE SYSTEM

On Feb. 15, Chick and Chris Kenney of Santa Ana opened separate laptops and punched in all the information at the park’s reservation website for their favorite campgrounds for a July 4 outing. Twenty seconds before 7 a.m. they started selecting the sites until they got them.

Chris got her reservation on the first try while her husband got his at 7:05 a.m. on the second attempt.

“There have been times we did the same thing and we didn’t get anything,” Chick Kenney said. “If you don’t get it, you don’t get it.”

The southern California campers offered another tip: pick one day instead of blocking out a week. “When we get there we reserved for five days,” he said.

Yosemite lovers have created all manners of foolproof methods to win a site. Bottom line, have everything ready to go before 7 a.m. Pacific on the 15th of the month, five months before the dates you want to reserve.

Finally, it never hurts to double check the reservation website at the last second. Cancellations and no-shows occur all the time, according to those in the know.

Back at Camp 4’s waiting line, Adcock and Traut remained in good spirits, if sleep deprived.

“If we didn’t get it we’d just pick another hike and spend the day in the mountains,” Traut said of the waiting game. “We’re on a nature high.”