Yosemite unveils multi-million dollar renovations ahead of summer

YOSEMITE VALLEY, Mariposa County – The first spine-tingling sight for millions of Americans visiting Yosemite National Park each year is Bridalveil Fall, the thundering 620-foot waterfall on dramatic display during the drive into Yosemite Valley.

For those wanting a closer look at the falls, however, the base has been shut down for most of the past five years. Park crews have been addressing a slew of problems, from overcrowded and crumbling trails to a lack of places to see the falls and use the bathroom. As one Yelp review put it, “the falls themselves are 5 stars. The hike is 0 stars.”

This year, the grounds beneath the iconic waterfall are open again after a $19.4 million overhaul. The makeover, which includes new trails, viewing decks and modern flush toilets, is among a handful of improvements coming online at the park in time for the busy summer season.

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Some might say that Yosemite, with its unparalleled pageant of granite walls, snowy mountains and towering waterfalls, needs little more to satisfy visitors. But park officials want to make the experience smoother. A new visitor center and newly branded Yosemite Exploration Center are among the recently opened attractions.

“It’s a big year for visitor-leaning projects getting completed,” said Kathleen Morse, chief of planning at Yosemite National Park, during a tour this week of the upgrades. “You can really see it. It’s tangible.”

Much of the work, made possible with funding from a San Francisco-based nonprofit, the Yosemite Conservancy, alongside the National Park Service, was done to make it easier for people to get around the park and interact with it while confronting the intractable issue of crowding.

In addition to the capital projects, the biggest effort by the park service to better accommodate visitors and address crowds this year is the mandatory day-use reservation system. Designed to limit how many people are in the park, the temporary policy represents a major shift from last year when parking lots regularly filled up and hours-long back-ups were common at entrance stations.

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The park service is considering making the reservation system permanent.

Bridalveil Fall, until this year, was ground zero for the over-crowding. Yosemite officials described the base of the falls as the “highest density” place in the park, due to both the allure of the drop and the fact that it’s the first big waterfall that visitors encounter in Yosemite Valley. Yet the area was not set up to handle the traffic.

“People were walking on the road. Car doors would just randomly open,” said Adonia Ripple, chief of operations for the Yosemite Conservancy. “And the trails were just dirt, narrow and rocky.”

Construction since the fall of 2019 has turned the primitive site into a much more hospitable stop.

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The parking lot was redesigned to accommodate more cars. Four pit toilets were replaced with restrooms with plumbing. The crumbling asphalt paths were widened, revamped with concrete and reconfigured to improve circulation, with some routes braced by new steel-supported boardwalks. Several handsome cedar-planked viewing decks were added.

Pro-tip, though: wear Gore-Tex and layers when you visit. The reworked site offers a more intimate experience with the snow-fed waterfall and its cold, splashing mist.

The park’s new visitor center, called the Yosemite Valley Welcome Center, is perhaps the most notable effort to improve the experience of those coming to the park.

Located in popular Yosemite Village, next to the Village Store in the former site of a sporting goods shop, the $12.5 million center is positioned to help a lot more people orient to the park and plan their visit.

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Already, daily ranger contacts are up 25% since the center opened, park officials say.

The 3,000 square-foot space, fitted with high ceilings and wooden beams and big windows that showcase the Valley’s majestic granite cliffs, houses park-staffed information desks, a bookstore run by the Yosemite Conservancy and interpretive displays about the park.

“When you arrived in the Valley (before), you went to a yurt,” said Morse, with the park service, referring to the former makeshift information office nearby. “You’d finally get to the park. You’re parked on a dirt lot. The restrooms are on a trailer. That is not a welcoming.”

At the other end of Yosemite Village, in the building that had been the Valley’s official visitor center, the Yosemite Exploration Center has opened. The refurbished space, at a cost of $700,000, has a renewed focus on science and history, with new and old exhibits on display.

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Educational panels reveal such fun facts as the presence of 30 different monkeyflower species in the park, the hiring of the first horse-mounted female ranger at Yosemite in 1918 and the death of nearly 20% of California’s giant sequoias in wildfires in 2020 and 2021.

“It’s really meant to pique curiosity,” said Ripple.

While Yosemite benefits from tens of millions of dollars of federal funding each year for improvements, some of the recent upgrades were partially paid for by the less-known Helium Stewardship Act of 2013. Signed by President Obama, the policy directed the federal government to sell off some of its massive underground helium reserves with a portion of the proceeds going to parks.

The Yosemite Conservancy has been another primary funder of park projects, providing more than $200 million over the past decade.

Reach Kurtis Alexander: [email protected] X:@kurtisalexander