Yosemite: staffing and snow worries

Drivers have started rolling into Yosemite and finding entrance booths empty, with signs telling them to pay on the way out instead of at the gate. Yosemite’s own fee page says every entrance except Hetch Hetchy is open 24 hours a day and that visitors can pay when exiting if a station is unstaffed. (nps.gov) That is landing at an awkward moment, because Yosemite dropped its timed entry system for 2026 on February 18 and now expects visitors to arrive without advance vehicle reservations even in peak summer. The park says the 2025 season showed enough parking and traffic capacity on most weekdays, but it still warns that millions of people visit from April through October and tells drivers to come before 9 a.m. or after 5 p.m. to avoid long delays. (nps.gov, nps.gov) So the same park that is opening the door wider for summer traffic is also showing visible gaps at the front door. Recent reporting says visitors and employees have seen stations at entrances including Arch Rock and Big Oak Flat sitting unstaffed at times in March and early April. (sfgate.com, timesnownews.com) People who work around the park say the missing staff are not just cashiers collecting fees. Entrance workers are often the first people who answer road-condition questions, explain chain controls, flag campground changes, and redirect visitors before traffic knots up deeper inside the valley. (protectnps.org, nps.gov) The staffing problem did not appear overnight. Reporting over the past year tied Yosemite’s strain to broader National Park Service cuts and hiring disruptions, including about 1,000 National Park Service probationary employees fired across the system in early 2025 and later accounts of Yosemite seasonal workers going weeks without pay while hiring paperwork lagged. (abc30.com, npr.org) At the same time, the park’s spring show may peak early this year. California’s Department of Water Resources said its April 1, 2026 survey at Phillips Station found no measurable snow, and the statewide snowpack was just 16 percent of the April 1 average as of April 7. (water.ca.gov, snow.water.ca.gov) That matters in Yosemite because the park’s famous waterfalls run on mountain snow like a bank account that melts out through spring. When March turns hot and dry, the account gets spent faster, so the strongest flows can arrive earlier and fade sooner than visitors expect from the usual late-spring calendar. (water.ca.gov, nps.gov) California water officials said March 2026 looked alarmingly like March 2021, with record heat, shrinking snow, and runoff that can vanish into dry soils and warm air before it ever reaches reservoirs. In Yosemite terms, that is the kind of spring that can make waterfalls roar in March and April, then look tired by the time many families arrive in June. (water.ca.gov, water.ca.gov) Put those two shifts together and Yosemite’s 2026 season starts to look uneven: fewer barriers to getting in, fewer people visibly staffing the gates, and a shorter window for the classic peak-waterfall visit. The park is still open, but the old assumption that the busiest months also bring the fullest rivers and the smoothest operations looks less reliable this year. (nps.gov, snow.water.ca.gov, sfgate.com)