Outdoorsy Yosemite

I am fairly neutral about this park. There was nothing stellar that outweighed the negatives but there are signs the owner appears to care about making improvements. The best thing about this park is it is about 1/2 drive to the South Gate of Yosemite National Park which was our reason for visiting. That gate is relatively easy to get through - on a Saturday at 10 am we were in the park within 15 minutes and parking for the shuttle to the Sequoia Grove about 5 minutes later. Unfortunately, it’s another 2 hours to the Yosemite Valley from there and that’s the area where the popular waterfalls are located. About the RV Park, we were told the park has undergone many updates and there is evidence of this in one of the bath/shower houses (there are 3 shower houses) that seem to have new tile and updated sink areas. Unfortunately, cleanliness over the weekend left a lot to be desired and two of the toilets stalls in the women’s side ran out of paper during the day without replenishment. In addition to this, the park had significant challenges installing a new hot water heater in one of the other bath/shower houses. This mechanical issue limited the ability for the park to provide adequate services to the many campers for the weekend. They had about 85% capacity including their cabins for the weekend. Office staff was smug at best when we approached the subject. Other noticeable items showing the park is being worked on is that you can see where trees have been removed and they are taking care to nurture some grassy areas. Signs around the grass tell you not to let the dogs on the grass. There is a relatively new playground area for the children. We saw several families using it and the children appeared very happy with their play activities. There is a new dog park close to the office with trees for shade and a dirt surface. We did not use the dog park as we preferred to take long walks around the park to stretch our legs and give the dogs lots to smell. Be aware that the park is on a hill creating steep interior roads. Many sites are quite tricky to get into and where the park has flat sections, they squash sites together very tightly. Additionally, they mix “cabins” and RV sites together. We had to put our trailer in between a tree and a cabin with no room for error. We were lucky in having a 22 Ft Airstream that maneuvers easily. Others had significant challenges. The park has a pool that we saw many families using. They have a snack bar that was closed all 5 days of our stay due to illness of the cook. The soda machine also had a sign on it letting people know it was not working. They also have an adult and separate child’s club house that can be used. They have a community fire pit and had a fire each evening we were at the park. There is a laundry trailer that has 4 washers and 4 dryers. Washers were $1.75 for 35 minute cycle and dryers were $1.50 for 60 minutes. They were on good working order during our stay and the dryers did a nice job on all my loads. They have a small store that I briefly glanced at while checking in but didn’t look like much we needed. We walked our dogs through the nature trail that starts in the RV Park to a small cove of Bass Lake. It was an intermediate level hike and we enjoyed it. There is no direct view or easy lake access from the park. Park wifi was strained and we were not able to use it except to check email occasionally. We were lucky to have decent WiFi through our own Airstream installed system. To call this RV Park a “resort” is a stretch but seems to be a goal the owners are working towards.