What’s open for Labor Day recreation despite closure of national forests in California
The USDA Forest Service may have closed 20 million acres in California to public use for more than two weeks, but many state and federal parks, wildlife areas, private campgrounds and some other federal lands remain open as the busy Labor Day weekend approaches.
Thousands of would-be vacationers saw the Forest Service’s announcement Monday that because of fire risks, the federal government is closing all national forests in California through at least Sept. 17 starting Wednesday.
Soon after, the phones at the Yosemite Mariposa County Tourism Bureau began ringing nonstop. In a panic, the callers wanted to know if their plans for Labor Day weekend at Yosemite National Park were shot.
Yosemite remains open, although visitors won’t be allowed into the park without a reservation, and campers will be required to abide by restrictions on where they have a campfire, park officials say.
“I think, understandably, there’s a lot of confusion,” said Tony McDaniel, a spokesman for the Yosemite Mariposa tourism bureau. “I think that it just kind of comes from maybe just confusion over what is a national park and what is a national forest.”
The National Parks Service, managed by the U.S. Department of the Interior, is a separate federal agency from the Forest Service, which is managed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The park service has no plans to issue a California-wide closure on its 28 national parks and dozens of other recreation sites it manages in the state, which include Pinnacles, Joshua Tree, Kings Canyon and Sequoia.
The same goes for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, another Interior agency, which manages 15 million acres of federal land in California as well as camping and other recreation areas scattered across the state.
Check websites before heading out
However, visitors should check the website of any recreation site or park they’d like to visit to see if fire restrictions or other closures are in place.
For instance, The Devil’s Postpile National Monument near Mammoth Lakes in the Southern Sierra is closing Wednesday in response to the Forest Service closures, even though that recreation site isn’t a Forest Service property.
“The access is on a Forest Service road; it’s surrounded by Forest Service,” said Scott Gediman, a spokesman for the National Park Service. “So due to the fact that visitors will not be able to get down there, it is going to close.”
A check-before-you-go approach also is probably a good idea if your Labor Day vacation plans include heading to one of the 280 state parks or the hundreds of miles of coastlines and lakes and river access points managed by the California Department of Parks and Recreation.
The Newsom administration hasn’t issued a statewide closure at those properties, but several parks threatened by various fires, such as the Caldor and Dixie, are closed to public access including Donner Memorial and Emerald Bay state parks in the Lake Tahoe area.
A list of closed state parks can be found here.
Similarly, some wildlife areas managed by the Department of Fish and Wildlife also have closed from fires or from access issues caused by the Forest Service closures.
The list of closed wildlife areas can be found here.
This story was originally published August 31, 2021 at 2:19 PM with the headline "What’s open for Labor Day recreation despite closure of national forests in California."