Something a bit different today — I’m cross-publishing this one with AllTrails. In my short time here so far, I’ve gotten my hands on some of the most in-depth and interesting data in the industry and I’m excited to continue diving into the micro and macro trends in recreation across the US (and the world).

If you’ve got any thoughts or ideas that might be relevant to AllTrails, feel free to reach out!

Don’t worry, there are plenty of things that make more sense for this Here & There alone, so there will still be a lot of independent newsletter topics.

—Kyle (say hi via email, LinkedIn, or just reply to this email)

If you hiked the Mist Trail in Yosemite National Park on a weekend this spring, you don’t need us to tell you it was crowded. But, let’s dig into why it might feel that way.

In August 2024, after four years of pilot programs and a public engagement process that started in winter 2022, Yosemite National Park released a 224-page draft Visitor Access Management Plan outlining four options for managing day-use visitation. The plan's preferred option, the one the National Park Service (NPS) explicitly recommended, was to continue a parkwide reservation system covering peak hours–a system first put in place in Yosemite in 2020. That recommendation was built on three years of data, public input from gateway communities (towns near the entrances to national parks), and the park's own assessment of what was working with reservations.

This past February, the Department of the Interior overrode that recommendation, and Yosemite, along with other parks that had existing reservation systems, like Arches, Glacier, and Mount Rainier, opened the 2026 season without timed entry for the first time in more than half a decade.

Why did reservation systems exist in the first place?

Even before the pandemic outdoor boom, the case for introducing a way to control crowds was already strong. Visitation was at record highs and places like Yosemite were seeing three-hour traffic jams on summer holiday weekends. According to the NPS, the five years leading up to 2020 make up four of the top five most visited years ever for Yosemite. The first day-use reservation system in Yosemite went in during 2020 as an emergency COVID response, and other parks followed suit. Yosemite spent the next five years refining its approach, running additional pilots in 2021 and 2022, with a temporary pause in 2023.

According to the 2024 report, the 2023 season without the reservation system produced "long lines at entrance stations and increased strain on the park's employees, resources, and infrastructure." The system came back in 2024 in a more limited form, with reservations every day during peak summer, and weekends only in spring and fall.

Why were reservations removed?

The administration's stated reason is to improve access; that’s a worthy goal, and one we care a lot about at AllTrails, but what that actually means is nuanced. Kevin Lilly, Acting Assistant Secretary for Fish, Wildlife and Parks had this to say in a press release about the removal of reservations: "Our national parks belong to the American people, and our priority is keeping them open and accessible."

It’s important to note that while many conservation-minded organizations favored making reservations permanent, there were also detractors, primarily gateway-town advocates and their Congressional representatives. Rep. Tom McClintock, whose district includes Yosemite, suggested in a June 2025 op-ed that the reservation system suppressed visitation and harmed local businesses. He claimed the reservation system, caused an average of 700 cars to be turned away every day, and between May and October, stops at the Mariposa Visitor Center dropped more than 10 percent from the prior year.

It’s true that reservation systems can discourage spontaneous visits. If you don’t plan in advance, you might not come at all. And if you drive up from the Central Valley or the San Francisco Bay Area on a weekend with no advance reservation, hoping for the best, and get turned around at the gate, the businesses you may have spent money at in the area lose a customer. One Oakhurst hotel manager said that guests were checking out early when they learned they needed reservations: "People are just like, 'I'm going to check out and go to Lake Tahoe.'"

Whether the benefits to gateway town economies are worth the infrastructure, environmental, and administrative costs of unfettered access is a real debate. But the administration's data claim isn’t backed by the Visitor Access Management Plan or park employees. In March 2026, the Yosemite Union surveyed 135 verified park employees: 85 percent disapproved of McPadden's decision, predicting "angry, disappointed, and exasperated guests who take out their frustrations on frontline workers."

What dropping reservations looks like so far

Most of the spring coverage of these parks so far has been via viral anecdotes: posts about crowds, long lines to enter the park, parking issues, etc. But at AllTrails we have some of the strongest data on trail visitation patterns across the country. We looked at trends and year over year data on the top trails in parks that dropped reservation systems. It’s not surprising to see they’re more crowded now, but the data reveal more than just lines at the gates.

Parks that dropped their reservation systems are seeing growth in trail engagement, which, even after accounting for AllTrails' platform-wide growth, run well ahead of comparative national parks. Measured against the median parks this year, Mount Rainier and Yosemite sit at the very top of the field.

Weekends are seeing a higher impact than weekdays. The growth is concentrated exactly where the reservation system was designed to relieve pressure: weekends. Weekend starts on Yosemite's top trails grew +10.6% year-over-year, more than double the +4.7% on weekdays. Saturday, already the busiest day of the week, grew fastest of all at +15.5%. The reservation system was built to flatten that weekend spike; but that spike is reasserting itself.

The top ten trails in the park, hikes like Lower Yosemite Falls, the Mist Trail, etc, still account for the majority of hiker volume. But the growth we’re seeing is mostly mirrored across the rest of the park, and growing fastest on weekends, which suggests that as the marquee trails fill up, people are spilling onto the next options over. Basically, the whole park still feels impacted, not just the top trails.

People are adapting. The busiest start time on Yosemite's top trails moved from 9 AM to 8 AM year-over-year, and the share of hikers starting before 7 AM climbed from 9% to 11%. The shift is sharpest on weekends, where the typical start time jumped about half an hour earlier. Reviews echo the data: mentions of early-morning starts are up sharply in 2026, with AllTrails members framing pre-dawn departures as the only way to beat what one member called 'Disney-like' lines on the Mist Trail.

Our data gives a strong read for how people are recreating in these parks. It isn’t a complete proxy for visitation, since not everyone uses AllTrails, most parks lack reliable cell service, and peak season hasn’t fully kicked off yet. But, official NPS stats are also estimations, and the data we have at AllTrails is granular: usage trends on key trails and key zones, time of day usage, and more. We can compare to other visitation stats and benchmark that data against previous years and broader platform growth. Long story short, the increases here are significant.

What this means on the ground

These aren’t just abstract numbers. They translate to more people on trails, earlier in the season, in places that were already running at high capacities before the systems were removed.

For Yosemite specifically, that means more pressure on the Happy Isles zone, more crowding at viewpoints like Tunnel View and Glacier Point, and more strain on Valley parking (as well as that parking filling earlier in the day). Viral videos of cars at the Oakhurst entrance and cars parked illegally around the park won’t be isolated occurrences this summer, it’s simply what an unmanaged peak season looks like.

For Glacier, it will mean that Going To The Sun Road will have serious congestion issues when it opens in the next few weeks. Parking will be an issue.

For Rainier, it means more pressure at Paradise and Sunrise, the two corridors that were specifically designated for timed entry in 2024 because of the damage being done to subalpine meadows and the parking chaos at trailheads. Those problems will be back. Graham Taylor, senior program manager at the National Parks Conservation Association called this out when the elimination was announced, telling National Parks Traveler that “Reservations ensured visitors could spend more time outside and less time circling for a parking spot.”

Strain shows up elsewhere across park infrastructure as well. Bathrooms that get hit harder than the maintenance schedule planned for. Overflow parking pushed onto road shoulders. These were the exact problems Yosemite's 2024 NPS report flagged, and we’re seeing some of it reflected in review data. Mentions of trash and litter in AllTrails reviews in Yosemite are up more than 50% year-over-year.

These infrastructure issues hit doubly hard with a reduced workforce. Since January 2025, the National Park Service has lost roughly 24 percent of its permanent workforce — about 4,000 employees through layoffs, buyouts, firings, and resignations. McPadden's plan for managing Yosemite without reservations leans on "active traffic management", which includes increased staffing at key intersections, digital congestion warnings, and signage directing visitors toward Tuolumne Meadows and other less-visited areas. The problem is that "increased staffing" requires staff, and the park has less of it.

The administration maintains that other strategies can replace advance reservations entirely. The data from this spring suggests that case will be severely tested this summer.

So what do we do?

The parks are going to be busy whether we worry about it or not. So if you're headed to Yosemite, Rainier, or anywhere busy this summer, a few things that make the day better for you and everyone behind you:

Show up ready. Download your maps before you lose signal, because service drops at many trailheads. Check recent conditions and the forecast so you're not the person who needed help that a stretched ranger had to provide. Pack out a little more than you packed in, and be prepared to pivot; there are plenty of worthwhile options in and near these parks.

Go when others don't. The data is clear that weekends and mid-day are peak times. A weekday trip, or an early start, is the single biggest difference-maker, and the hikers already doing it are often the ones writing the most positive reviews. Check what time of day a trail tends to peak before you commit to a plan.

Be kind. Rangers and gateway-town staff are short-handed and catching grief for decisions made outside the park boundaries. A little patience goes a long way right now.

None of this is new advice, it's the stuff our community already believes in and practices. It just matters more this year, because there are going to be a lot of people out there. Take care of our wild places, take care of each other, and we'll all have a better summer for it.

What AllTrails' Insights Say About US…