Yosemite is an amazingly beautiful national park, but you need a plan when visiting. We thought we had a plan, but it didn’t turn out as expected. I’ll try to explain.

The night before we entered the Park, we stayed in Bridgeport, California, which is east of Yosemite National Park very near the Nevada state line. We had about a forty minute drive to Yosemite’s east entrance.

Leave no doubt almost all of the hotels on the eastern side are grossly overpriced. We stayed in the Walker River Lodge which is an older motel. Our room with tax and all was $190, and the hotel was not full.

If you wait to gas up at Tioga, which is the closest place to the eastern side of the park, they really soak you. Gas was about $2.59 in Nevada. The gas in Tioga was $4.09 a gallon.

We turned on to SR 120 which leads to the eastern entrance of the park. The views and scenery were awesome!!! We quickly climbed to cross a summit at over 9,000 feet.

We entered the park from the east side, because this is summertime, early August; and we thought it would be better to do it backwards and during a weekday. The big urban areas are west of the park, so the crowds come from that direction early in the morning. Right?

Well, not exactly!

We did Glacier backwards, and it worked beautifully. We entered it from the less traveled eastern side and had no traffic or crowds until we got at least half way across the park.

Not so for Yosemite. At first there was little traffic. But by the time we got to the east entrance which is quite a ways down SR 120, the traffic had already picked up. At the entrance there was a line of cars waiting that was over 20 deep. Where did they all come from?

A ranger, though, was walking from car to car; and when he got to us, he noticed we were seniors and asked if we had senior park passes. We did, so he motioned us on through the entrance. No wait in line. Being old does have it advantages from time to time. ?

So we are driving all the way across the park with no stops. We have a lunch reservation (big mistake) in the dining room of the park’s premier lodge The Majestic Yosemite Hotel. We love to visit these old park hotels.

Rooms here were booked well before summer and are expensive. We didn’t plan our trip until around the middle of June, so we were not staying at The Majestic but instead at the Yosemite Valley Lodge nearby. This turned out to be a great choice, because of the traffic.

Still, we had to cross the park. We had about two and a half hours to drive all the way across the park to get to our lunch destination. The drive crosses a Sierra mountain range with snow in its higher elevations. It is beautiful but we can’t stop because of the lunch reservation. ?

A highlight of these older and larger national parks are their old Grand Dame hotels. Our favorite was the one at Mt. Hood that was built during the depression when the WPA hired all the area’s unemployed artists and skilled carpenters to build the hotel there. The Timberline Lodge is an architectural and artistic gem. We are never disappointed taking time out of our vacation to check out these beautiful facilities.

But first, I need to talk about the traffic in Yosemite. It is just truly horrible. By the time we got to about a third of the way across the Park we caught up with a long line of cars following an RV. He was slow because he had to be. What he didn’t have to be, though, was so darned inconsiderate.

There were numerous places he could have pulled off to let the growing line of cars go. We fell farther and farther behind for our scheduled lunch. Then we hit the real traffic. As we got closer to our destination, it just got worse.

By the time we got to the Yosemite Valley where several of the lodging facilities are located including the Majestic Yosemite Hotel, it was bumper to bumper with two lanes going in one direction. I’ve seen less traffic on a Saturday night in Miami Beach.

We finally got to The Majestic, but we were thirty minutes late for our reservation. I was totally stressed; but it seemed that everyone else was late, too. They took us right into the dining room, which was beautiful.

The Majestic was built in the 1920s. We had a wonderful lunch.

The Merced entrance to Yosemite (a western entrance) seems to be the closest to everything like El Capitan, Half Dome, Yosemite Falls, etc. This western entrance has a hotel called Yosemite View Lodge that could be perfect for day trippers, but Yosemite needs several days. We stayed three, and I still felt it wasn’t enough. There is so much to see.

If you plan several days in the Park, stay in one of the Park’s facilities. While we were there, there were only two available. They were $125 for a tent house in Half Dome Village and $250 for a room with a king bed in the Yosemite Valley Lodge. We stayed in the Tamarack building of the lodge, which was ideal. Great room, great views of the valley walls, good parking, and a good shuttle stop.

So our well thought out plan did not work. The hotels out the east entrance were way over priced, even though they were not full; and they were too far away to see anything other than the mountain range on the east side of the park, which was magnificent–but there is so much more you will want to see on the west side of the Park.

So here are my five take aways from Yosemite:

1. Don’t miss the Park’s amazing scenic vistas. Four of my top six were views and hikes from the Yosemite Valley Rd. which can only be entered from the west side of the park. They were El Capitan, Half Dome, Yosemite Falls (it is dry by the first of August, though), and Vernal Falls. We had a view of Yosemite Falls from our parking lot.

Two more vistas are on down the Tioga Pass Rd. toward the east. Olmsted Point is beautiful when visited just before sunset, but be careful driving back. It was a long drive, and we had a bear lope across in front of us. Thankfully, we saw him in time.

Also on the western side, a walk in Tuolomne Meadows is extra special with an amazing view of the Cathedral Range, the backbone of the Sierra Nevadas.

2. The traffic is horrible. You just cannot imagine how horrible it is. Best thing to do if you want to see something in the Yosemite Valley is to park your car and use the shuttle.
You can even park in the parking lots of the hotels. Our parking lots in Yosemite Valley Lodge were available to anyone, even day trippers. So park and then get on the shuttle.

Shuttle maps are available in the hotels and visitor centers. The map we got only showed the valley, though. We didn’t realize there was a shuttle that went elsewhere in the park until we were leaving and saw shuttle signs outside of the Valley.

Get out early because the day trippers and much of the traffic doesn’t get into the park until about 10 am.  Then plan to be off the roads between 10 and 3 pm, when they all start leaving.  Don’t plan to use the roads between 10 and about 3 pm.

3. Best place to stay is somewhere on the Yosemite Valley road. It runs one way–a Northside Drive and a Southside Drive. It is very hard to stay outside the park and try to do the park as a day tripper. The traffic is so bad that you spend a lot of precious time trying to get from one place to the other.

4. Distances in the park are very deceiving. The drive from east to west across the park takes over two hours, and during peak times I have no idea how long it would take to go the opposite direction. If you need to get to anywhere in the valley area, add another half hour to an hour. This is where the traffic is the worst.

Your GPS will give you a time of arrival, but it cannot figure in the traffic–probably even WAZ but I didn’t try it so I’m not sure. Also, there is no cell service for most of the park, but I did get AT&T in the valley area.

5. The park map that they give you at the gate? Don’t lose it. Thankfully, we didn’t lose ours until the last day. We literally needed it just to get out of the park. There are several entrances.

We checked at the front desk of the hotel, but they said we had to get it from the information stations or at the gates. To drive anywhere that time of day in the park is an hour drive even if it is just down the road.

Finally, we figured out how to get out of the park; and because I still needed a brochure to write about the park, we stopped to get one at the gate. They said that we needed to ask for it when we come back in. Oh dear!

Don’t lose your park map!

Also, realize that they have changed the names of several lodges and places to stay. For example, The Majestic Yosemite used to be The Ahwahnee. They are still using the old map with the old names.

In addition, a lot of the stops are not marked. We missed Valley View and had to circle back. This map is hard to follow, and if you take a wrong turn in the valley, you pay hell getting back because of the one way roads and the traffic.

If you aren’t sure what stop it is and you are on a one way road, stop and figure it out. If you pass it, you may never get back to it.

Trust me. The traffic is horrible.

But the views are breathtaking!