Yellowstone National Park has joined a handful of other parks that allow you to purchase your entrance pass online before your park visit/NPS
You can now download a digital pass to get into Yellowstone National Park. It won't enable you to drive through the entrance station without stopping, but will speed things up a bit if you're in a hurry to get into the park.
The digital passes, which became available this week, enable you to go online and buy your park entrance pass before your trip. You can print out the pass, or store it on your smart phone to display when you get to the park entrance.
It will not allow you to drive right on through the station and have the pass read electronically, as with E-ZPasses used to pay highway tolls. But that is something that could arise in the future.
“We are pleased to offer a digital option to purchasing passes at entrance gates and to usher in a new era of online convenience for our visitors,” said park Superintendent Dan Wenk.
YourPassNow provides an alternative to the traditional paper-based, in-person purchase method while also providing the park with a tool to help manage the visitor experience. Once purchased, passes are emailed and can be used immediately, stored on a personal device, or printed for future use.
Yellowstone officials are optimistic that if more folks bought their entrance passes in advance, it could help quicken the pace of traffic entering the park.
In 2016, Acadia National Park (Maine), Colorado National Monument (Colorado), Theodore Roosevelt National Park (North Dakota), Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks (California), Castillo de San Marcos National Monument (Florida), Everglades National Park (Florida), and Whiskeytown National Recreation Area (California) made online entrance passes available with YourPassNow.
Yellowstone National Park 2018 annual and seven-day fees include:
- $60 annual entrance pass fee
- $30 seven-day entrance passes for a private vehicle
- $25 seven-day entrance passes for a motorcycle or snowmobile
- $15 seven-day entrance passes for an individual
- Persons under age 16 are admitted free
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Comments
Curious - does your seven days begin at time of purchase or do you specify an entry date?
You specify the date you plan to arrive at the park, EC. So you can buy one today...with an arrival date of June 10. Then the software automatically calculates the date the pass expires.
Interestingly, if you purchase an annual pass, the clock starts ticking the day you make the purchase.
I don't understand why they don't use a toll system. They can send you a bill straight to you based on your license plate. No need for lines, wasted fuel, aggrivation, and you can allocate park employees at visitor locations to help facilitate the visit.
Would this be beneficial for people with the lifetime Senior Pass? Perhaps I'm just not imaginative enough, but it seems like a toss-up between showing the digitial pass (which you don't even mention as being available for the Senior Pass) and showing the Senior Pass itself. I see the time saving as mainly being associated with the payment, which would not be an issue if someone already had the Senior Pass.
On a different note, the reCAPTCHA kept asking questions until my internet connection failed. I realize that National Parks Traveler did not develop reCAPTCHA, but I encourage Traveler to use whatever influence it has to get reCAPTCHA to provide more intelligible instructions. When it says to select all squares with street signs, does the pole holding a street sign count as a street sign? Is a highway sign a street sign? The technology could be better, and by supporting reCAPTCHA, Traveler is supporting inferior technology.
And after going through all that, I get told that my name belongs to a registered user. You couldn't tell me that before making me look at small fuzzy pictures?
pyfgc, we couldn't agree more that reCaptcha is a nuisance that thrives on overkill. Even the EIC has been forced to go through repetitive street signs and roads. For what it's worth, we have noticed many other sites are stuck with it, too.
Hi Troy, many, many visitors already have annual passes, or are driving rental cars (tracking down people with that would seem to be a nightmare). The park also uses contact at the gate to distribute important info and advise visitors on things like road closures or other safety messages.
Not really. If you have your plates linked to your pass, you'd be set. If you're driving a rental, they just bill the rental company who bills you. This is the way the Golden Gate Bridge toll works. The only wrinkle would be an annual pass visitor driving a rental car. But, in that case you could set a rental plate at the rental location (where there should be internet service) as a temporary plate. I suggest the main point of contact would be the visitor center. I don't see why we want to continue a system in which hundreds of cars sit idling. After all, the idea is to protect these places not continue to emit exaughst fumes into them.
How do I apply for pass without knowing my license plate number as I will be in a rental? Also are you skipping lines if you have purchased a pass in advance?