Comment by whyenot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by whyenot | Hacker News Reader

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> However, until people would rather camp than stay at the $600/night hotel, and cook over a campfire rather than eat overpriced food

I think this borders on "gatekeeping." There are other lodging options in Yosemite Valley which are much less expensive than the Ahwahnee. Yosemite belongs to the American people, and everyone should have a chance to enjoy it, not only those who want to sleep in a tent and cook on a fire. There has been paid lodging in the valley since before Yosemite was a park.

Food and lodging in the valley are expensive. The shuttle bus system is currently a joke. Aramark, Delaware North, and YP&CC (especially in the malaise years 1970-1993) have not always been good stewards, but in spite of that, the park is a national treasure that all should have a chance to enjoy, not just those in the "rock climbing scene" who want to stay at Camp 4 and rough it.

Aramark's contract should be cancelled. It happened at Crater Lake, and the NPS would have justification to do it in Yosemite, but the last two transitions between concessioners was pretty bad; there is good reason for the NPS to be cautious. If there was the capacity for better NPS oversight, the best move would probably be to break up the contract into smaller pieces and have more than one main concessioner. The Ansel Adams Gallery and Yosemite Mountaineering School are already under different contracts and there is precedent from other national parks (for example Glacier).

Maybe a certain level of gatekeeping is necessary in order to protect the parks? Requiring people to actually camp when visiting the wilderness hardly seems unreasonable. Particularly if accomidations are put in place for people with physical disabilities.

I think you're right that there needs to be actual competition between park services, but I am doubtful it will make that much of a difference. The public appetite for attendance absolutely dwarfs the capacity of the park. To meet demand you'd have to build a whole city.

I've given up on Yosemite. There are lots of other places to go in California (and beyond). Although they are starting to get crowded too...

You may be right, but even if the concessioners aren’t great, the valley can still be a wonderful, quiet, peaceful place to be. Especially in late spring when the dogwoods are in full bloom, the waterfalls are full, and the summer crowds haven’t arrived yet. After Labor Day is also nice. Summer crowds aren’t fun, but I do feel like there is another way of looking at it: so many people going outside and enjoying nature instead of looking at the world through their phones. There was a time pre-Covid when attendance and interest in national parks and state parks was kind of on the wane, and it’s nice that so many people want to come and enjoy these places.

How much of the demand is domestic I wonder? When I’ve been to places like this there seems to be a lot of international tourists.

Roughly a quarter are international.

I know I'm just some random guy and I'm hardly representative of the average American vacationer, but I tend to visit national and state parks on family road trips. There's a lot of amazing places in our country and I'm always talking to travelers about what they've seen.

Sure, I see a lot of foreign visitors, but I see a lot more domestic ones. I figure their money's just as good as mine, and it'd hardly be fair to complain about them after I've done the tourist thing in Japan, Spain, and Gibraltar.

> Yosemite belongs to the American people, and everyone should have a chance to enjoy it, not only those who want to sleep in a tent and cook on a fire.

Why? It's a wilderness park. The other 99.99% of America is always available to people who only want to stay in hotels and eat at restaurants.

Some of us can't.

I can sleep in a tent any time of year (although I'll pass if it's over 90° at night), but my girlfriend needs a CPAP and has back problems that prevent her from sleeping on the ground. We both love nature and have visited dozens of parks, but for health reasons we can't really hike more than a couple miles a day. We still enjoy the parts we can see near the roads and visitor centers.

Every time we visit a new part of the country, parks are the first thing I look for. Both of us spent our childhoods camping, but in her case her parents were too poor to take her anywhere too far from Oklahoma, and my family mostly just visited the southwest. Neither of us have seen Yellowstone or California's coastal redwoods or Yosemite or Crater Lake or Glacier National Park, and those are all on our bucket list.

Why do there even need to be corporate, profit-maximizing concessionaires? Couldn't the NPS itself develop this expertise and run them directly? So frustrating this trend where the government doesn't allow itself to do anything, instead funneling taxpayer money into the pockets of profit-seeking businesses.

Compare any airport with airport run concessions vs corporate run concessions. As long as the corp ones aren't a single corp running the entire airport, the corp ones almost always provide a better experience. They have to to attract customers. The airport run ones do not because they have a monopoly on concessions. They are almost universally atrocious. Bad incentives lead to bad outcomes. I think it's possible to setup corporate run concessions with positive feedback loops. I think it's impossible to do the same for government run concessions.

I completely agree that people should be able to enjoy Yosemite without needing to "rough it", but realistically this is something that is only accessible to people who can afford to spend upwards of ~$300/night (that's the room rate in El Portal, right outside the park entrance). Factoring in the park entrance fee, transportation, and food, it's easily a $1k weekend trip - not something the average American has access to.

The campsites are affordable and several have nice bathrooms/showers, but they get snatched up en masse at the beginning of the season by tour operators, so your only hope of getting one is by monitoring campflare.com.

We all collectively support an enormous commercial venture in and around Yosemite Valley, so we all collectively contribute toward increasing the price of entry and thus making the valley less accessible for everyone else.

What about being at the campsite's ranger office when it opens and being first in line to get a no show or canceled site? I used to do that, but it might not work anymore since Recreation.gov came online.

There are cheaper accommodations inside the park. I've gone there for $200/night for a room that sleeps 4. In fact, I've never paid $300/night and have gone many times. I'm sure you can pay a lot if you go at peak times, but $300 is not the base rate. Transportation cost will obviously add a lot if you're coming from a distance, but that's true regardless of the park's fees.

It's very possible to get campsites but you do need to pounce right when they open up, especially in busier times of year - https://www.nps.gov/yose/planyourvisit/camping.htm

I and many of my friends regularly wake up to do the 7am clickthrough on recreation.gov and often (though not always) are successful for the dates we're trying to get.

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