After decades of decay and disrepair, the Tuolumne Meadows Campground is refurbished.
Park rangers say it has seen very little maintenance in the last 60 years, and they couldn’t afford the necessary repairs.
“Some of the campsites were on an angle, and there were clay pipes. And so [construction] was literally from the ground up,” Park Ranger Scott Gediman said.
The campground has 336 sites, hosting thousands of people every summer.
So Gediman says the bathrooms and picnic tables had seen better days.
“We do not have the budget as a park to keep up on that maintenance,” Deputy Project Manager Moshe Calm said. “So over the years, it became something that just wasn’t getting the attention it deserved.”
Then, a $26 million grant in 2023 gave the park the cash to get to work.
“We were able to get funding to renovate all of these restrooms, all eight restrooms in the campground, as well as replace underground water and sewer, and we’ve also had the ability to restore our riverfront here on the Tuolumne River,” Calm said.
He says they faced a lot of challenges in the repair process, specifically while refurbishing the water system.
They had to dig four-foot trenches to replace the pipes, which led them straight to granite.
“We had a lot of boulders,” Calm said. They simply turned those obstacles into ornaments. The entire campground is now lined with rocks and boulders that they found underground.
They had to work efficiently, though. The campground sits at about 8,600 feet, so the construction season only lasts from June to September.
“A typical snowpack is about six feet, about as tall as me. And so that really limits the work we can do,” Calm said.
He says, even in spring when the snow melts, the ground is too wet to work.
Finally, after two years of work and millions of dollars, they say the Tuolumne Meadows Campground can open for business, with much better places for guests to do their business.
They say it’s not about the new sewer systems or refurbished bathrooms, though.
All of the manmade improvements are simply to elevate the scenery that man could never make.
The campground will open Aug. 1, and guests can reserve campsites on Recreation.gov.
