Yosemite National Park’s monthly visitation numbers for March grew by over two-thirds this year, according to recent data. The rise in visitors comes as the park approaches a reservation-free and potentially chaotic summer season.
According to a monthly public use report published by the National Park Service, Yosemite recorded 225,817 recreational visitors in March. That’s up about 45% from the 155,758 visitors recorded in March of last year, and the highest number of visitors the park has seen in March since 2016.
The trend isn’t limited to the month of March: Recent annual visitation data showed that Yosemite drew more visitors in 2025 than any of the five previous years, even as the park service reels from the fallout of staffing shortages and budget cuts. Conservationists who work closely with the park fear that more visitors to Yosemite will not only damage part resources but also sour the experience of visiting.
“Especially on Saturdays and sometimes also on Fridays and Sundays, the amount of crowding in the Park exceeds capacity of the parking lots, results in vehicles parked inappropriately wherever they can squeeze in along roads, and results in a crammed-together visitor experience,” John Buckley, executive director of the Central Sierra Environmental Resource Center, told SFGATE in an email.
According to Buckley, one visitor described a recent trip to Yosemite as being punctuated by hour-long wait times to enter the park, cars parked dangerously along roadsides and “wall to wall” crowds of people that were “tripping over each other.” The visitor told a CSERC staff member that being in Yosemite “felt like a day at Disneyland,” and that “John Muir would have been horrified” by the state of the park, Buckley wrote.
The boom in visitors has come shortly after the National Park Service announced it will be doing away with summer reservation requirements at several popular parks, including Yosemite. The park was hit with an especially chaotic weekend on the heels of this announcement.
Last month’s wave of visitors came as staffing shortages left several of the park’s entrance gates unstaffed during regular business hours and sometimes for multiple days in a row. In an emailed statement, a park spokesperson told SFGATE at the time that Yosemite’s entrances are “managed based on visitation and operational needs.”
“Ray, the new Park superintendent, has made it clear that he personally sees it as desirable to have even more visitors to Yosemite rather than managing visitation to reduce vehicles, crowding and congestion,” Buckley wrote. “We’ll see how that plays out, especially from Memorial Day on through the peak summer season.”