YOSEMITE VALLEY — For 45 minutes Saturday morning, Cynthia Aparicil and Ulises Martinez inched in a line of traffic toward the entrance of Yosemite National Park.

Once through, the couple from Orange County headed to Yosemite Valley — only to circle parking lot after parking lot, unable to find a spot.

“There are smaller parking lots where it was just like five people were just waiting for one spot,” Aparicil said as Martinez unpacked their hatchback in an unofficial spot. “On the side of the road, it was packed. Some people were just like parking crazy, sticking out, and we don’t want to park like that.”

Welcome to Saturdays in Yosemite National Park — and that was before Memorial Day or the busy summer season. This year, for the first time since 2023, visitors will no longer need a reservation to enter the park on busy summer days; last year, the reservation system began in June. The goal is to make the park easy to visit. But the trade-off, officials readily acknowledge, is crowds on peak-season weekends —  especially Saturdays. That manifests largely in competition for parking, particularly in the valley, and potentially long waits at the gate.

In an interview with the Chronicle earlier this month, Yosemite Superintendent Ray McPadden said that Saturday mornings, in particular, will be busy in the park, but other days are mostly “fine.”

“We’re not going to create elaborate restrictions for people,” McPadden said. “I think, generally, people have a high tolerance for other people around them.”

For the past several Saturdays, the alert pings have come rapid-fire and early: “Curry Village parking full. Parking may be available at Yosemite Falls parking area.” “All parking in Yosemite Village is full.” “All parking at Glacier Point is full.” This weekend, with beautiful weather, was so busy that the alerts came Friday morning as well. Memorial Day weekend, a perennially popular weekend, is widely expected to be a “zoo,” in the words of one Reddit-er.

Martinez said his experience this weekend was markedly different from the times he visited the park with a reservation. Then, he said, he had waited in line for up to 15 minutes to get through the entrance and would be able to find parking without resorting to a patch of grass.

Around noon Saturday, in the parking lot near the Yosemite Falls Trailhead, a steady stream of cars crawled through the lanes. Cindy Woythal, from the Tahoe area, said she and her daughter had reserved a camping spot in the adjacent campground, but she had little hope she would find a spot, pointing to several cars competing with her for space.

“It’s going to be back to taking your entire day to drive around the valley,” she said while she slowly moved along in a line of vehicles searching for an open spot. “The reservation thing was a big issue when it first came out a couple of years ago, but we all adapted, and now this is what you get, you get too many people.”

Woythal said she and her daughter just wanted to set up their tents when a car behind her honked their horn. 

“Then you have impatient people like that,” Woythal said before driving out of the lot.

But for some visitors, the free-for-all was preferable to the planning that comes with committing to a reservation weeks ahead of time. Alfredo Espino of Santa Clarita (Los Angeles County) pulled into a spot after searching for about 20 minutes. When he had come before with a reservation, he said parking was “still kind of a nightmare.”

“I feel like with a reservation system, it was a little harder to get into the park,” he said while applying sunscreen. “You have to really plan ahead because everybody is trying to get in here as opposed to just being able to come.”

Within three minutes after Espino parked, two hopeful drivers asked whether he was leaving.

McPadden, who became superintendent last year and helped fend off a planned permanent reservation policy, told the Chronicle that he’s dedicating more staffing to traffic control in busy Yosemite Valley and encouraging the purchase of digital entry passes to reduce backups at the gates. The park saw an unexpected 45% jump in visitation in March over a year earlier, as warm, dry weather beckoned visitors and hastened the snowmelt feeding the waterfalls. 

While McPadden doesn’t anticipate attendance to jump above average as much as it did in March, he does anticipate a busy peak season.

“I’m expecting visitation to go up, and that’s fine,” he said.

On Saturday, some visitors abandoned plans to drive to different hiking spots in the valley after encountering fierce parking competition. Alondra Garcia, of Modesto, sat at a shuttle stop after her search for parking led her nearly 4 miles away from her desired hike at Mist Trail. 

She called the process frustrating and wished she knew when exactly the shuttles, which depart every 8 to 22 minutes, were scheduled to come. Garcia said she would prefer to have a reservation system if it meant avoiding the traffic hassles she had encountered before boarding her shuttle. 

The shuttle system appeared to be operating at maximum capacity through Saturday. On at least three occasions, a fully loaded shuttle passed by crowds of people waiting to board, leaving behind visitors visibly confused or frustrated. At another point, a shuttle driver laid on his horn for at least 10 seconds to clear three cars idling in front of a shuttle stop.

One shuttle packed with people rolled into the visitors center around 5 p.m. to meet a crowd of people waiting at the stop. The driver told its passengers to disembark because the vehicle was going out of service — nearly doubling the crowd outside. Soon after, another bus came, already filled to capacity. One visitor remarked they should have just left after lunch.

Park officials encourage people who want less crowding to visit midweek, or arrive in the park very early or late in the day. McPadden, for his part, said that some groups are longing for a past in which there were far fewer visitors and that this was unreasonable to expect today.

He said that the National Park Service plans to survey visitors this summer about their experience in the park, and that media reports have exaggerated the congestion.

“Just because we say parking is full, it doesn’t mean there’s chaos in the park,” he said.

Kurtis Alexander contributed to this report.