YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK — Summer has returned to Yosemite National Park’s High Country — the snows have melted along the park’s famed Tioga Road, purple lupin and yellow buttercups are in bloom and the lakes provide a stunning backdrop to massive granite domes.
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But one common fixture has been in short supply in recent years: campers.
That’s about to change. The largest campground in Yosemite National Park — and one of the largest at any national park in the United States — is reopening after being closed for three years for a major upgrade.
Workers have finished construction on a $26.2 million renovation of Tuolumne Meadows Campground. It is set to reopen Aug. 1.
Located at 8,600 feet along Tioga Road more than an hour’s drive from Yosemite Valley, the campground has 336 campsites that serve more than 140,000 visitors a year, offering a key starting point where generations of hikers and backpackers have set out to explore Yosemite’s wilderness of sub-alpine meadows, Ponderosa pine forests and scenic granite peaks.
The campground originally was built in 1934 by President Franklin Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps. Back then, the goal was to stop people from parking randomly in the fragile meadows. The facilities they built created countless vacation memories over the decades. But time took its toll.
“This is a well-loved campground,” said Kathleen Morse, Yosemite’s chief of strategic planning during a recent visit.
“It has a historic and more rustic atmosphere than Yosemite Valley,” she said. “But it was getting pretty dilapidated. Drainage was poor. Sites weren’t level. It was a free-for-all with parking.”
Crews rebuilt the campground’s aging water and sewer systems. They upgraded electrical equipment, and replaced every picnic table, fire ring and food locker at 336 campsites. They renovated the outdoor amphitheater, repaved the access road, added disabled parking spaces, and moved 21 sites out of the floodplain of the Tuolumne River.
“Yosemite gets 4 million visitors a year,” Morse said. “That’s hard on infrastructure. We want to protect the natural resources so they are here forever, and provide a good visitor experience. This is a crown jewel park. We want to have crown jewel facilities that the public can be proud of.”
The Tuolumne Meadows Campground is more than a stop on one of the most famous mountain roads in the American West. It’s also a critical access point for the public.
With campsites for cars, groups and walk-in users, Tuolumne Meadows makes up nearly one-fourth of the roughly 1,500 campsites in all of Yosemite National Park. It has been closed since 2022 for the construction, which could only take place in summer months because the area is buried in up to 6 feet of snow during winter.
Last week, a few early visitors wandered in to see its rebirth.
“This is one of the nicer places we’ve seen on our trip,” said Kevin Thurston, who was visiting with his wife and two sons from Houston. “If we lived closer we’d come up here more. Definitely thumbs up.”
Nearby, Meg Henry, visiting with her husband, Bill Henry, and their two nieces from Los Osos in San Luis Obispo County, remembered how the old campground had aging facilities and a scattershot parking system.
Meg Henry, of Los Osos, fills her camelback with water as her husband, Bill Henry, and their nieces look on at the Tuolumne Meadows Campground in Yosemite, Calif., on Wednesday, July 23, 2025. (Ray Chavez/Bay Area News Group)
“There used to be cars everywhere,” Meg said. “Instead of cars you see nature.”
Campsites at Tuolumne Meadows are $36 a night. Reservations for all Yosemite hotels and campgrounds can be made at recreation.gov.
The upgrade is the latest in a series of major renovations at Yosemite in recent years. Last year, the park built a new $12.5 million visitor center in the heart of the valley near the Village Store, and completed a $19 million renovation of the trails, restrooms, parking lots, signs and wooden boardwalks around Bridalveil Fall.
This month, crews broke ground on a $220 million project to rebuild the park’s 45-year-old wastewater treatment plant at El Portal.
The money for the Tuolumne Meadows Campground, the El Portal upgrades and several other key projects came from the Great American Outdoors Act. That law, signed by President Trump during his first term in 2020, provided $6.5 billion in new funding to the National Park Service and $3 billion to the U.S. Forest Service, Fish and Wildlife Service and other federal lands agencies to upgrade long-overdue maintenance projects.
A buck feeds from a branch at the Tuolumne Meadows Campgrounds in Yosemite, Calif., on Wednesday, July 23, 2025. After three years of being closed for major renovations, the campground, originally built by Franklin Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s, will open on Aug. 1. (Ray Chavez/Bay Area News Group)
Republicans who have in recent years voted against similar environmental efforts embraced the bill after two Western senators, Cory Gardner, R-Colorado, and Steve Daines, R-Montana, were up for re-election in 2020 and urged the White House to embrace a major parks bill they were supporting to help their chances. Daines ended up winning his election. Gardener lost to Democrat John Hickenlooper.
The money, however, continues to fund projects across the United States and the West. In California, it has paid to rebuild water lines at Sequoia-Kings Canyon National Park, upgrade a wastewater system at Furnace Creek in Death Valley, and repave roads and build a new drainage system at Yosemite’s Glacier Point.
Frank Dean, a ranger at Yosemite from 1990 to 1995, also served for 10 years as president of the Yosemite Conservancy, a nonprofit group in San Francisco that has raised private donations to fund hundreds of projects to improve the park’s facilities and restore its environment.
Dean said that although Yosemite Valley receives most of the attention and visitors, Tuolumne Meadows and the park’s higher elevations are singularly beautiful.
“Yosemite Valley is incredible,” Dean said. “Everyone should be able to see it at least once in their life. But to get into the heart of the park’s high country is really special. If you haven’t been up there, you should go. The meadows are flat. You can walk along the river. You can see iconic peaks. It’s an amazing place and it is easy to get to. It’s very special up there.”
Jonathan Winters of the National Park Service and his dog, Tuli, walk past one of the renovated campsites during a tour of the Tuolumne Meadows Campgrounds in Yosemite, Calif., on Wednesday, July 23, 2025. After three years of being closed for major renovations, the campground, originally built by Franklin Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s, will open on Aug. 1. (Ray Chavez/Bay Area News Group)
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