Trouble’s brewing at the entrance gates to Yosemite National Park

At 3:15 p.m. on an unseasonably warm Thursday in mid-March, Yosemite National Park’s Arch Rock Entrance had no line. Cruising by the entrance station, the reason became clear: There was no ranger there to collect fees, field questions or hand out maps.

“Station closed,” a sign in the window read. “Pay when exiting park.”

Over the past month, an untold number of people entering Yosemite have had this same experience. Visitors, park advocates and tour guides who regularly drive into the park all told SFGATE that they, too, have been rolling through unstaffed entrances at various times of day. And Yosemite employees who spoke with SFGATE under the condition of anonymity to protect their jobs, in accordance with Hearst’s ethics policy, said the national park’s crown jewel simply doesn’t have enough employees to cover all the shifts.

“It is a staffing issue,” one Yosemite employee with access to the gate schedule said.

The Big Oak Flat Entrance and the Arch Rock Entrance have been most impacted, according to another employee, with workers at those gates often starting shifts later than usual and ending earlier. In some instances, the gates have gone unstaffed for entire days and even multiple days in a row, including weekends, the employee said.

Under normal circumstances, the gates would be staffed during regular business hours, an employee said, apart from slow days when trainings or meetings take precedence.

“This is certainly out of the ordinary,” the employee said. “Looking at our org chart, I would roughly estimate the current permanent gate staff levels are around or a little less than 50% of what they would be if we had complete staff.”

An unidentified National Park Service spokesperson disputed claims that Yosemite gates are understaffed, arguing that “the problem with claims like these is that they rely on anonymous sourcing to create a false impression of dysfunction where none exists.”  

“Yosemite is open, entrance operations are being managed based on visitation and operational needs, and the park has hired additional staff approved back in December, and is using trained staff and flexible scheduling to maintain fee collection during the off season while seasonal employees are still onboarding,” the spokesperson wrote in an email. “Staffing is managed according to operational needs, and any occasional short gaps are part of normal off-season operations.”

According to employees, Yosemite officials were recently allowed to post 20 new permanent positions, including several fee technicians (the formal title for gate staff), but none have come on board yet. Meanwhile, all the winter seasonal employees departed by mid-February, and the new seasonal employees aren’t expected to begin until April, employees said.

“Right now, they are having to stack schedules so that certain quieter days of the week are unstaffed at certain entrances so that enough staff is available on weekends and busier days,” one employee said.

Former Yosemite Superintendent Don Neubacher, who is also on the executive council of the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks, has been hearing of the gate staffing shortage from his contacts at the park. It’s a big problem, Neubacher said, because the park is losing out on money that’s needed for things like upgrades to buildings, routine maintenance and resource programs. And it’s a lot of money.

Gate staff members make just $20 to $25 an hour, but they collect vast amounts in entrance fees at Yosemite, particularly now that the Trump administration has increased prices for international visitors.  

U.S. residents pay $35 per vehicle for a seven-day entry, or $80 for an “America the Beautiful” pass, which provides access to federal lands for a year. International visitors are now charged an additional $100 per person, or $250 for an “America the Beautiful” pass.

When Neubacher served as superintendent between 2010 and 2016, the park was bringing in some $25 million a year in visitor fees, he estimates. March is one of the less busy months, welcoming around 160,000 people. But if half of those people don’t pay fees at the gate, it adds up to millions of dollars in lost revenue.

“The park needs that revenue to keep operating,” Neubacher said. “Every dollar is needed.”

Mark Rose, Sierra Nevada program manager at the National Parks Conservation Association, has witnessed vacant gates while driving into Yosemite this year, and described the situation as “counterproductive.”

“Critical entrance fee dollars are going uncollected,” he told SFGATE in an email. “This has drained funding from parks that are already stretched thin, resulting in lost revenue for visitor services, trail maintenance, and more.”

In addition, both Neubacher and Rose pointed out that the park is losing opportunities to educate visitors at the gate about weather, closures and other safety issues.

“Entrance booths are often the first interaction visitors have with park staff,” Rose wrote. “We aren’t just losing staff capacity and revenue, we’re losing that crucial point of contact that helps keep visitors safe and informed.”

Although fully staffing entrances has sometimes been a problem in the past for the chronically underfunded agency, Rose said the issue has been exacerbated by the loss of permanent staff and the delays in seasonal hiring under the Trump administration.

The Interior Department did not respond to a question about how many permanent staff positions have been lost at Yosemite since 2024. But Neubacher said that an insider with knowledge of the park’s staffing levels told him there are 362 permanent employees in 2026, down from 387 in 2025 and 410 in 2024.  

When frequent Yosemite visitor Megan Kerr took a three-day trip to the park with her husband and daughter in mid-March, the lack of rangers stood out. She noticed fewer employees than usual throughout the park, she said, but she was particularly surprised to find the gates unstaffed all six times her family drove in through the Big Oak Flat and Arch Rock entrances.  

“None of the entrance booths were staffed, no fees were charged,” Kerr told SFGATE. “We went through at various times of day, 9 a.m., noon, 3 p.m., 6 p.m.”

Visitors are required to pay entrance fees whether or not entrance gates are staffed, according to the Park Service spokesperson. But there was not a way to do so at the gate, Kerr said, and she was unable to purchase a new “America the Beautiful” pass. She didn’t mind much, considering “you know whose picture is on it,” she said. She also had to laugh about how Trump made a show of charging international visitors an extra $100 per person, but now there was no one to collect it.

At the same time, she worried about the impacts of unstaffed entrances on Yosemite.

“The park deserves to be making money, to you know, keep it up,” Kerr said. “And really, there should be more rangers.”