More Visitors, Shorter Waits? Yosemite Releases New Summer Data

More people are visiting Yosemite National Park this year, but according to new data released by the National Park Service, most visitors surveyed this summer aren’t spending more time waiting to get in.

Preliminary results from a peak-season visitor survey found that 96% of respondents rated their recreational experience in Yosemite as good or excellent, while 91% reported either no entrance delay or a wait of less than 15 minutes.

The findings come during a year when Yosemite has seen visitation increase significantly — and during the park’s first summer since dropping the vehicle reservation system that had been used during portions of several recent years.

Through July, Yosemite recorded approximately 2.59 million recreational visits, an increase of 9.5% compared with the same period in 2025.

The combination presents an interesting picture of Yosemite’s summer season: more visitors are coming through the gates, but the park says changes in how it manages traffic are helping keep many of them moving.

What Visitors Said

Washington State University conducted the in-person survey from Aug. 7 through Aug. 16, collecting 1,203 responses at locations throughout Yosemite.

The survey was intentionally conducted during the busy summer travel season and before many schools returned to session.

Among the preliminary findings:

• 96% rated their recreational experience as good or excellent, including 67% who rated it excellent.
• 91% experienced no entrance delay or waited less than 15 minutes.
• 56% said they spent less time looking for parking than they expected.
• 11% said finding parking took somewhat or much too long.

The National Park Service cautions that the findings are preliminary and represent a snapshot of visitors during the 10-day survey period. Washington State University and NPS are continuing to analyze the results, with additional findings expected later.

Visitation Is Up

The survey results become more notable when compared with Yosemite’s visitation numbers.

National Park Service statistics show Yosemite recorded 665,877 recreational visits in July, compared with 616,551 in July 2025 — an increase of 8%.

Through the end of July, the park had recorded approximately 2.59 million recreational visits, up about 9.5% from the same period last year.

The increase can also be seen at several individual entrances.

At Yosemite’s South Entrance on Highway 41, recreational visitation through July was up approximately 10.1% compared with 2025.

Arch Rock was up about 9.8%, Big Oak Flat was up 6.6% and Tioga Pass was up approximately 21.5%.

Hetch Hetchy was the notable exception, with visitation down compared with the previous year.

The 2026 figures remain preliminary and are subject to revision by the National Park Service.

A Summer Without Entrance Reservations

This summer also provided an important test for Yosemite’s approach to managing crowds.

In February, Yosemite announced that it would not require vehicle reservations to enter the park in 2026.

Reservation systems had been used during several recent summers, beginning during the COVID-19 pandemic and later as a way of managing congestion and visitor access.

When Yosemite announced the change, park officials said an analysis of 2025 traffic patterns found that most weekdays maintained available parking and stable traffic flow, leading officials to conclude that a season-long reservation requirement was not the most effective approach for 2026.

Instead, the park expanded other traffic-management strategies.

Those have included changes to entrance operations, active traffic management, additional parking and shuttle capacity, and more real-time information for visitors.

Yosemite Superintendent Ray McPadden said the new survey suggests that approach is working.

“We want to make it easier for people to experience this incredible place,” McPadden said in announcing the preliminary findings.

He said the park is welcoming more visitors while relying on traffic management, technology, parking, shuttles and visitor information rather than seasonal access restrictions.

Only Two Significant Traffic-Delay Days

Perhaps the most striking figure released by Yosemite isn’t from the visitor survey at all.

According to NPS, Yosemite experienced only two days with significant traffic delays in 2026 through the time of the Aug. 28 announcement.

Both occurred during Memorial Day weekend.

Park officials say traffic gridlock days in Yosemite once exceeded 120 annually.

That doesn’t mean congestion has disappeared.

Yosemite continues to warn visitors that the park can become extremely busy, particularly during summer weekends and holidays. Entrance lines, full parking areas, crowded trails and delays inside Yosemite Valley can still occur during periods of particularly high demand.

Earlier this summer, the park warned that visitors arriving after 8 a.m. on busy weekends and some weekdays could encounter entrance waits of two hours or more, difficulty finding parking and additional congestion inside Yosemite Valley.

The difference between those warnings and the newly released survey results illustrates an important limitation of the numbers: the survey captures the experiences of visitors during a specific 10-day period rather than every busy day of the summer.

Technology Becoming Part of the Solution

Yosemite is also increasingly turning to real-time information to help manage congestion.

The park introduced online entrance wait information this summer for Arch Rock, Big Oak Flat and the South Entrance, giving visitors another way to gauge conditions before reaching the gates.

Another system under development would use cameras to count vehicles entering and leaving parking areas.

That information could eventually allow the park to tell visitors when particular parking areas are approaching capacity before additional vehicles enter already-congested areas.

NPS says the cameras would be used solely to count vehicles for traffic management and visitor information and would not be connected to law-enforcement systems.

The technology is part of a broader effort to give visitors more information before they encounter a traffic jam or full parking lot.

Yosemite’s Crowding Question Isn’t Going Away

Despite the positive survey results, Yosemite’s larger debate over visitor access and congestion is far from settled.

The park has spent years studying how to balance public access with traffic congestion, emergency response, parking limitations, staffing demands and protection of natural and cultural resources.

Those questions are at the heart of Yosemite’s ongoing Visitor Access Management planning process.

For now, however, the early numbers from 2026 offer an encouraging data point.

More people are visiting Yosemite.

Most of those surveyed still describe their experience positively.

And at least during the period studied, the long entrance lines many visitors associate with a busy Yosemite summer were not the experience reported by the overwhelming majority of respondents.

Whether those results hold across the entire season will become clearer when Washington State University and the National Park Service release their full analysis.