National Park Service to adopt reservation system for Mount Rainier National Park

Mount Rainier (Təqʷuʔməʔ to the Puyallup) is per­haps the defin­ing nat­ur­al fea­ture of Wash­ing­ton State. For well over a cen­tu­ry, it has been pro­tect­ed as a nation­al park, and is con­sid­ered to be one of Amer­i­ca’s finest nation­al parks.

In recent years, it has been draw­ing more and more peo­ple dur­ing the sum­mer months. That heavy auto­mo­bile traf­fic and the over­crowd­ing it brings to key des­ti­na­tions with­in the park has become an increas­ing headache for the Nation­al Park Ser­vice to man­age. As a con­se­quence, NPS announced today it will be imple­ment­ing a reser­va­tion sys­tem for the park for the com­ing sum­mer sea­son.

“In recent years, it’s been too com­mon for vis­i­tors to sit in idling cars for a cou­ple of hours at the entrance sta­tions and then make laps through the park­ing lots hop­ing for an emp­ty park­ing space,” said Super­in­ten­dent Greg Dudgeon.

(I myself have wit­nessed mas­sive­ly long lines of cars try­ing to get up the road to Sun­rise on beau­ti­ful sum­mer days while dri­ving down from hik­ing Sour­dough Ridge or Bur­roughs Moun­tain, so I can attest to what Dud­geon says.)

“We are test­ing a sys­tem that will spread vis­i­ta­tion out through­out the day and sea­son to reduce crowd­ing,” Dud­geon explained. That sys­tem will be in oper­a­tion for most day­light hours dur­ing the park’s busy sea­son. Vis­i­tors will need to make a reser­va­tion between 7 AM and 3 PM in order to:

• Enter the Par­adise Cor­ri­dor from either the Nisqually Entrance via State Route 706 or Stevens Canyon Entrance via State Route 123 from May 24th through Sep­tem­ber 2nd.
• Enter the Sun­rise Cor­ri­dor at the White Riv­er Entrance via State Route 410 from July 3rd through Sep­tem­ber 2nd.

“Reser­va­tions can be made using Recreation.gov or by call­ing 877–444-6777. Dates through July will be avail­able on Recreation.gov begin­ning Feb­ru­ary 21st, 2024, for the Par­adise Cor­ri­dor and April 1st, 2024, for the Sun­rise Cor­ri­dor,” the Nation­al Park Ser­vice’s news release advis­es. “Reser­va­tions for dates in August through Labor Day will open on May 1st. In addi­tion to the reser­va­tions avail­able up to three months ahead, a block of reser­va­tions will be released each day through the sum­mer at 7 PM for use the fol­low­ing day.”

“Each reser­va­tion is for one per­son­al vehi­cle and will cost $2. The reser­va­tion will pro­vide a two-hour entry win­dow. For instance, vis­i­tors with a 9 AM reser­va­tion could enter the park between 9 AM and 11 AM.”

The reser­va­tion sys­tem won’t be in effect before 7 AM or after 3 PM, so if you’re an ear­ly bird and will­ing to time your arrival in the park for real­ly ear­ly in the morn­ing, you can still take a spon­ta­neous sum­mer trip to Sun­rise or Par­adise (but per­haps not both in the same day, unless you time your tran­sit to the oth­er side of the moun­tain so you’re going through the check­point after 3 PM).

Ten years ago, park vis­i­ta­tion was a bit over a mil­lion. Now it’s clos­er to 2 mil­lion. A vis­i­ta­tion man­age­ment sys­tem is clear­ly need­ed, and NPS plan­ning and out­reach iden­ti­fied a reser­va­tion sys­tem as a good approach. Such a sys­tem is already being pilot­ed else­where, like at Arch­es Nation­al Park, and seems to work well. NPI is ful­ly sup­port­ive of this pilot and thanks the Park Ser­vice for tak­ing thought­ful action to address over­crowd­ing and improve the vis­i­tor experience.