https://www.fresnobee.com/news/californ ... 08937.html
https://www.fresnobee.com/news/californ ... 02877.html
Glacier Point road will be completely closed for all of 2022 for reconstruction. This will make the southwest corner of the park wilderness less visited. Might be a good year for a Pohono Trail backpack starting at the Wawona Tunnel and then descending from Glacier Point on the 4 mile trail - no crowds of tourists at the Point.
There will also be ongoing construction work on the Tioga Road causing delays.
Tuolumne Meadows campground will be completely closed for renovation until at least 2024! Here's the official announcement:
https://www.nps.gov/yose/planyourvisit/tmcamp.htm
Important for us backpackers: the Tuolumne Meadows backpackers' campground will also be CLOSED that entire time. Hopefully, the one at White Wolf will be open.
The High Sierra Camps are expected to re-open in 2022, after being closed for two years because of the Covid pandemic. That means more crowded conditions around those camps and on the trails to and from them, including more horseshit on the trails from the pack trains servicing the camps.
Aramark says they plan to restore the hiker bus service from Yosemite Valley to Tuolumne Meadows and to restore the Tuolumne Meadows shuttle. I don't trust Aramark a lot, so we shall see.
The description of the new wilderness permit system in Yosemite also had this interesting piece of data:
There’s increasing interest for getting into the wilderness. Yosemite issues upwards of 25,000 wilderness permits each year from May to November, with the three people on average per trip, Webb said, so around 100,000 people yearly who normally go on two to four-day backpack trips. That’s an increase from around 5,000 wilderness permits a year in the early and mid 1990s, he said. “The wilderness is basically full,” Webb said, “and so we really need the permit system more than ever to manage who’s out there and for how long.”