Travel Tuesdays: Yosemite National Park

I was not prepared for Yosemite National Park, in many ways. Most of them good. It's quite hard to describe the view as you enter the Valley from the primary access route on a clear day. The sense of scale, the way it stretches out of your view. Then to be trekking along the Valley floor, looking up. When we were there, the extreme snowfall had intensified all the waterfalls significantly (and dangerously in a number of cases). It was a little overwhelming.

It's also one of the most overcrowded and poorly managed parks I've ever visited. I could see signs of improvements-in-progress, but that did not help the severe congestion and chaos while we were there in the main part of the park. Unlike Zion and the Grand Canyon, Yosemite hasn't quite figured out the best way to manage all the people in such a restricted space (the valley floor may be getting bigger on a geologic scale, but that's not going to help visitors this century).

The first day we visited, the crowds were so rough that we planned a very early arrival our second day into the park. (Crowds actually trigger a pocket of my claustrophobia; I wish I were joking. If we're going to do a Mother's Day brunch, I prefer to do it on the Saturday of that weekend, rather than the actual day itself. That way I'm not feeling like a herd to be corralled somewhere.) It was the right choice to make for the views as well. 

The snow in the months before we visited had been so intense that year that we weren't able to get to parts of the park we wanted to visit. It's unclear if they opened at all that summer, so intense were those storms. And I do want to visit again. However, this is where politics comes back into the mix. Last I read, Yosemite was hard hit by all of the DOGE cuts and freezes and general nonsense. It's unclear if the park will be able to get itself sorted any time soon. Which is a real shame, but it's beginning to look less like a bug and more of a feature of the current administration. This is part of the reason why I use postcards of US National Parks when I send my political postcards for getting out the vote and grassroots campaigns to keep or turn things blue.

Yosemite is one of this country's oldest protected environmental and cultural sites. It's stunning to visit and more than a little overwhelming. It deserves far better than what it's getting at the moment.