Changes at Yosemite National Park Lead to Chaos and Overcrowding Over Memorial Day Weekend

Memorial Day Weekend is a time for people to honor the men and women of the armed forces who have lost their lives, either in battle or at home. And while it's a somber occasion for many people who have lost someone they love, others use the long weekend as a time to honor our country's fallen heroes by visiting some of the places that they fought and died to protect, like our national parks.

However, the weekend hit a sour note for those headed to one park in particular in 2026.

That's because visitors reported chaos at Yosemite National Park after huge crowd surges caused shoulder-to-shoulder traffic, with many people saying that the trouble started when the National Park Service (NPS) ended its reservation system, which controlled the number of visitors allowed to enter the park at any given time.

After seeing record crowds at the park, many are saying that the NPS should return to its previous setup to avoid the increased congestion in the future.

The NPS ended its reservation system for Yosemite in 2026, according to its website. "The decision follows a comprehensive evaluation of traffic patterns, parking availability and visitor use during the 2025 season," a statement on the website says, adding that a seasonal reservation system is not an effective approach for the 2026 season.

As a result, visitors say that they were greeted with lots of traffic and large crowds when they began arriving at the park over the holiday weekend.

"It was a lot of shoulder to shoulder, a lot of chaos, a lot of angry people, a lot of oblivious people," one visitor told ABC7 in an interview, adding that there was no parking.

Despite the sheer size of the park — the park is 748,542 acres, according to Yosemite.com — visitors said that no matter where they went, the traffic and crowds followed. "And when you finally arrive somewhere, it's just thousands of people in the exact same spots," another person posted on Twitter.

When the NPS announced its decision to cancel the reservation system, the National Parks Conservation Association predicted this exact issue, saying that park visitation had climbed by 30 percent between 2000 and 2019, accounting for a million extra visitors each year.

In 2024, more than four million people visited the park, which officials managed by using the reservation system. However, without the delayed entry policy, it sounds like experts knew this issue was coming.

Whether the NPS will reinstitute the reservation system or test out other means of keeping the park visitation from overwhelming the local roads and creating an unpleasant situation for visitors remains to be seen. For now, it seems safe to say that if you plan to visit the park you'll want to plan for longer than normal wait times, crowds, and limited parking during those days when higher traffic is expected, especially over holiday weekends.