January 8, 2024 - Yosemite National Park gives everyone a little history on cars in the park.
The “All-Year Highway” (now Highway 140) opened July 31, 1926. This new route, which avoided the treacherous mountain grades on the Big Oak Flat and Wawona Roads, brought in motorists year-round in record numbers, nearly doubling the total quantity of cars annually visiting the park to 137,000 vehicles in just one year. By the summer of 1927, some days reportedly saw 1,200 cars parked in front of Curry Village alone.
Cars were a lot smaller back then and parking much more of a free-for-all, the open meadows largely fair game. Despite the influx of vehicles and the concessioner’s concern for visitor convenience, Superintendent W. B. Lewis commented that the park nonetheless ran smoothly. However, visitation numbers grew, as did the size of the cars. Traffic would increasingly become an issue.
At a ribbon cutting ceremony in 1970 to close the back loop of road by Happy Isles to private vehicles – what was then a first step in a three-year plan to close the entire Valley to cars, Ansel Adams gave a speech. In it, he said, “What I believe now is that we must cooperate with reality. The citizens of our country deserve the great experience of Yosemite, limited only by the requirements – physical, administrative, ecological – to keep this experience intact.”
“The Summer of 1927 has clearly demonstrated that parking is one of the most urgent, menacing problems of the entire Yosemite Valley.”
- Don Tresidder (1894-1948), President of the Yosemite Park & Curry Co., 1927
The Valley remained open to vehicles in 1973. Circumstances changed, as they do, but Adams' sentiment remains to this day. What actions should be taken to provide the experience of Yosemite that the public deserves? The question is especially difficult when dominant cultural trends conflict with that desired experience. So, while we continue our investigations as part of our Visitor Access Management Plan, we will test reservations this summer as yet another possible solution to this problem, “urgent and menacing” now for nearly one hundred years.
To learn more about the planning project, visit: www.go.nps.gov/vamp.
Source & photos: Yosemite National Park
