As Yosemite ditches reservations system, another crowded national park doubles down

Before Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado adopted a reservation system, visitors fought over parking spots, traffic backed up for miles, and some park employees quit after enduring constant confrontations with frustrated tourists.

"We saw a lot of problems at the park, with people getting into fist fights, shouting matches, all stemming from traffic issues," former Superintendent Darla Sidles told SFGATE. "The resources were being destroyed and trampled in the most popular areas just because of overcrowding, too."

Several years later, Rocky Mountain is the only major national park still requiring reservations to enter during peak hours in the busiest months - even as Yosemite, Glacier, Arches and other parks have eliminated similar systems.

The difference, local leaders say, is that Rocky Mountain spent years studying overcrowding, testing solutions and building support from nearby communities before making its reservation system permanent.

The park's small size coupled with high visitation also set it apart. Since 2015, the park has welcomed more than 4 million visitors in most years despite being just a fraction of the size of some of its peers - it's roughly one-third the size of Yosemite National Park and one-eighth the size of Yellowstone National Park.

"The town has always been pretty supportive of it, from businesses to citizens. Of course, there were those that came on later, but the key was always listening and making sure everyone who had thoughts on the system was heard," Gary Hall, the mayor of gateway town Estes Park, told SFGATE.

Before timed entry, Hall said, visitors regularly encountered miles-long traffic backups entering the park, and severe congestion plagued both Rocky Mountain National Park and Estes Park itself.

Now, visitors have a two-tiered "timed-entry" system for making reservations. One permit allows access to the Bear Lake Road corridor, the park's most popular area, between 5 a.m. and 6 p.m. A second permit covers the rest of Rocky Mountain National Park between 9 a.m. and 2 p.m. Visitors can enter without a reservation outside those windows.

That unusual consensus has helped Rocky become an outlier in the national park system at a moment when reservation systems elsewhere have faced growing political pressure and public backlash.

For advocates who have watched the debate over reservations play out across the country, Rocky Mountain's success wasn't an accident.

Tracy Coppola, Colorado senior program manager for the National Parks Conservation Association, said the park spent years studying overcrowding before launching what became the nation's first timed-entry pilot program in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic.

"They were very intentional about studying the challenge of overcrowding," Coppola told SFGATE. "This was decades in the making."

According to Coppola, park officials built support by working closely with gateway communities such as Estes Park and Grand Lake and by continually adapting the system as conditions changed.

"It was chaos before timed entry," she said, recalling visits to the park during peak summer crowds. "You couldn't find parking. You'd get turned around. You couldn't get to the places you wanted to go."

National Park Service officials say Rocky Mountain's circumstances remain unique and that the park's continued use of timed entry reflects the agency's park-by-park approach to managing visitation, rather than a systemwide policy. Reservation systems remain in place for some of the country's most popular attractions, including Yosemite's Half Dome and Zion's Angels Landing. But Rocky Mountain National Park stands out because its reservation requirement governs access to large portions of the park itself during peak hours rather than a single trail or destination.

"The National Park Service is not taking a one-size-fits-all approach," agency officials told SFGATE in an email. "Each park has unique infrastructure, visitation patterns, gateway community input, and operational needs."

Park Service officials said the system has also succeeded in spreading visitors throughout the day and across different areas of the park, helping alleviate crowding at some of Rocky Mountain's most popular destinations.

Supporters say those pressures are only likely to grow. Coppola said warming temperatures are already expanding Rocky Mountain's high season, bringing visitors earlier in the spring and keeping the park busier later into the fall.

The system may also help with one of the park's most demanding operations: search and rescue. Sidles, the former superintendent, said Rocky Mountain is one of the busier national parks for rescues, and while timed entry does not prevent emergencies, it can help spread visitation out and encourage people to plan more deliberately before heading into high-elevation terrain.

For now, there appears to be little interest in abandoning the system in Estes Park or among many of the park's longtime stakeholders.

Hall said he rarely hears complaints about timed entry from residents or visitors anymore, a stark contrast from the days when traffic routinely clogged both the park and the town.

"I do not get a lot of noise to my office about the topic," Hall said. "If it was a really substantial issue, I'd be hearing a lot."

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