Staying at Camp Curry in Yosemite National Park: A Review
Crisp evenings under the stars and watching the sun rise over the granite cliffs around you: that’s just another day at Camp Curry in Yosemite National Park!
The only glamping option within the park’s borders, the tents of Curry Village in Camp Curry has been home to visitors and seasonal workers for decades.
The canvas tents are rustic and bare bones, but they’re also a fun, unique experience that ties you to the gorgeous outdoors surrounding you here.
If you want a taste of camping without bothering with all of the equipment, Camp Curry might be what your trip to Yosemite is missing.
In the review below, you’ll find everything you need to know about this campground, including photos of the campground property and details about every part of our stay from check-in to check-out.
Simple canvas tents, unforgettable views!
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Camping in Yosemite National Park: What to Consider
Yosemite National Park consistently ranks in the top 10 most visited national parks in the United States, and it’s easy to see why.
The towering granite cliffs surround Yosemite Valley, the winding Tioga Road takes drivers to the postcard-perfect Tuolumne Meadows, and Wawona offers up ancient giants to explore in the Mariposa Sequoia Grove.
However, all of this beauty, and its proximity to Fresno, Sacramento, and San Francisco, means that the park can get packed in high season (summertime, as well as weekends and holidays in the spring and fall).
Because of the crowds that settle mostly in the Yosemite Valley area of the park, it can be tough to get accommodations of any kind, whether it be campgrounds or hotel rooms.
Yosemite National Park has 11 traditional campgrounds, 3 hotels, and 6 glamping/cabin properties scattered throughout, but there are times that all of those are at or very near capacity.
Camp Curry is the largest of any of the accommodations available in the park, so you’ve got a better chance of nabbing one of the 403 canvas tents than one of the hotel rooms, cabins, or campsites in the smaller campgrounds.
If you plan to visit Yosemite National Park on a weekend or holiday between April and October, or any day during the summer months, you should start trying to book your site 6-8 months ahead of your trip, and, honestly 9-12 months out gives you even more options.
Other Camping Options Nearby
If you can’t get a spot at Camp Curry, or if you just want to see similar options nearby, here are a couple that I recommend:
Housekeeping Camp
This glamping experience is one step below Curry Village in that you don’t have a front door on your sleeping area; instead, there’s a privacy curtain and canvas partitions separating your bed and personal space from others.
You’ll also have to bring your own bedding or rent a kit per person per night of your stay.
Housekeeping Camp is located in Yosemite Valley not far from Camp Curry.
Pines Campground
This sprawling campground is the traditional campground closest to Camp Curry.
It’s separated into 3 sections: North Pines, Lower Pines, and Upper Pines.
You’ll find RV only sites in all three, but tent only sites in just Upper Pines.
As with most national park campgrounds, there aren’t any electric hook-ups, so be ready to be self-sufficient if you’ve got a van or RV.
Yosemite Pines Family Campground and RV Park
If the park accommodations are completely at capacity, you’ll need to stay outside of the borders.
I recommend the cute and conveniently located Yosemite Pines Family Campground and RV Park near Groveland, CA. Yosemite’s northwestern entrance isn’t far from this property, and there’s even a YARTS (Yosemite Area Regional Transport System) bus that will pick you up from here and take you into the park.
You’ll find cabins, RV sites, and even Conestoga wagons at this kid-friendly campground.
Curry Village at Camp Curry Review
Curry Village is located in Camp Curry, one of the main hubs for dining and shopping in Yosemite Valley.
That makes it incredibly convenient to anything you want to see or do in the valley, and we loved being able to park our car in the parking lot here and use the shuttle instead.
Parking, like finding a hotel or campsite, can be tough, so the free park shuttle helps alleviate the stress of getting around when the park is crowded.
The over 400 tents here have been serving guests and park employees since 1899, though the park has probably replaced the canvas on most of them by now (kidding!).
The white canvas tents with their green doors and trim are an iconic part of the valley, and, today, they host seasonal workers in one section, and regular visitors in the remainder of the camp.
Elsewhere in Camp Curry, there are also cabins if you prefer a more upscale experience.
Here are some of my other California planning resources to help you out:
Check-in Process
Welcome to Camp Curry!
The day we checked into Camp Curry, we’d spent exploring Tioga Road to Mono Lake and back.
We made sure that we were in the valley and checking into Camp Curry before sunset, because the property can be very confusing when you are first getting your bearings, and I can only imagine how much worse it would be in the dark.
Camp Curry, where the tents at Curry Village are located, is well signposted throughout Yosemite Valley, so getting to the general area of the park wasn’t hard.
However, as soon as we turned into Camp Curry, we saw signs noting that parking at Curry Village was full, and I got worried.
We had suitcases and backpacks with us since we’d had to fly to California for this trip, and I was in no mood to haul those, and my tired kids, a long way.
We decided to deal with that later on, and my husband dropped me off at the registration desk. The first thing I noticed was how many people were there!
We’ve been to many of the most visited national parks even in peak season, and I think Yosemite is the busiest one that I’ve experienced yet.
It might not have more total visitors than somewhere like Zion National Park or Great Smoky Mountains National Park, but the visitors here at Yosemite are largely situated in the valley.
And that makes the entire area feel so, so busy even in the shoulder season when we were visiting.
The registration building was easy enough to find, but there was a line in the small building.
Once it was my turn at the desk, the cheerful employee led me through the check-in process.
You’ll need to pay the reminder of your balance at this point, as you only need one night’s deposit to hold your tent.
This is also when you can request additional wool blankets for your cabin, and get a map of the entire Camp Curry.
Overall, the employees were great about moving people through the check-in process, despite there being a checklist of information you have to get on where the bathrooms are, what to do with your food, and the like.
Individual Glamping Tent Review
Home sweet home
As I mentioned earlier, Camp Curry is big.
Finding your tent within Curry Village is the second hurdle in your stay after you’ve made it through registration.
Unlike a traditional hotel or front country campground, where you can park your car close to the hotel entrance or campsite, the tents at Camp Curry are scattered all over.
Guests at Curry Village do have a dedicated parking lot, called the Apple Tree Orchard lot, but even that can fill up. The lot is packed dirt and has potholes, so watch your step, especially at night.
You will have to haul your suitcases, coolers, bedding, and whatever else you need from your car to your tent, and there aren’t any of those helpful little carts you find in hotel lobbies.
We had to make a couple of trips from our rental car to our tent, number 322, in order to ensure all of the kids’ stuffed animals, our backpacks, and multiple suitcases made it.
The tents are not quite as clean and tidy as they look on the website, so keep your expectations low there.
Pros of Staying in Curry Village
The entirety of Camp Curry is adorable and super aesthetic with the canvas tents and green doors, but the inside of the tents is very rustic.
You’ll get a plywood floor, some basic beds, and one wooden chair. There is one wooden bedside shelf, a taller, free standing metal shelf for your keys, maps, and books, and a small safe for any valuables.
Each bed comes with a set of sheets, a pillow, and a Rumpl blanket. This is included in the nightly price.
Other than the bear box outside and a single bare bulb hanging from the ceiling, that’s it.
But, honestly, the stripped down tent meant that we didn’t want to just hang out in the room.
Instead, we wandered around Camp Curry and Curry Village. We chatted with our neighbors, who were visiting from Alabama for their daughter’s 13th birthday, and who gave us their leftover snacks when they had to catch a plane back home.
We walked over to Cook’s Meadow to watch the sun set over the granite cliffs around us, and then watch for the headlamps of the climbers bedding down for the night in their cliffside hammocks far above the forest floor.
We read on the steps of the tent, we bird watched, and my kids drew in the dirt with sticks they found.
We spend a lot of time in campgrounds, and Camp Curry has many elements of that experience because of the way that your stay is structured.
The vintage campground feel also extends to the fact that you get a physical key to open your cabin door, which is a rare thing these days! (Just don’t lose it.)
I also cannot say enough good things about the location of the tent village, as it truly allowed us to explore Yosemite Valley in a way that would’ve been much harder if we had to stay outside of the park.
Camp Curry is also pretty serious about quiet hours, which are from 10 PM to 6 AM. The canvas tent walls cover absolutely nothing in terms of sound, so a loud conversation can easily be heard rows away.
Thankfully, everyone around us quieted right down as soon as the clock struck 10 PM, and we could listen to the sounds of the nighttime as we laid in our beds.
Cons of Staying in Curry Village
When you don’t have wifi, a tv, or screens, you’ve got to get creative.
That being said, I am grateful for what we had, as I didn’t have a way to bring our camping stuff along on this trip. I am also very grateful for being able to stay in Yosemite Valley and not have to drive back and forth.
This very bare bones tent cost us well over $200 a night. That’s as much as I paid for a nice room at the Hilton Garden Inn in Monterey!
I know they have a captive audience, and, clearly, people are paying it, but this was one of those times on the trip that I really felt the weight of how expensive California is.
We also struggled with the heating, or lack thereof.
I’d paid for a heated tent since I knew we’d be uncomfortable without. We’ve camped in the cold before, but I wrongly judged the weather while we would be there and left most of our cold weather camping gear back in South Carolina.
The first night, we piled on the sheets and Rumpl blankets that had been provided to us, decided we’d be okay without the heat on as it was pleasantly cool in the tent around 10 PM, and went to bed…or tried to.
The temperatures dropped quickly as a cold front moved in, and I was worried the kids were shivering. I even had my husband go turn on the heat, so have him tinker with it before being unable to get it to start.
The next morning, we went to the registration desk to ask about getting our heater fixed, and the front desk employees told us that all of the heating units in all of the tents were off. It was policy that they turn them off after Memorial Day, regardless of what the forecast was going to be.
Our first night there, the temperature hovered around 37 degrees, so we weren’t comfortable at all. I was annoyed that I’d paid for a service and then didn’t have the ability to use it.
We did get even more wool blankets to pile on everyone that second night, and that did help, along with wearing several layers to bed. The overnight temperatures our second evening at Camp Curry were warmer—around 45 degrees—but still not warm by any definition.
Both nights, we had issues with the Rumpl blankets falling off of us onto the floor, which didn’t help our shivering. We have Rumpl blankets that we use when we’re camping, but they are much better for wrapping up around the fire or using while tent camping since they don’t slide around in either of those situations.
I wish the Camp Curry tents came standard with the wool blankets you get from the registration desk and not the Rumpl blankets for that reason.
I also wish that we’d either had the ability to use our heating unit in our tent OR had more communication about the fact that the tents were not actually heated after a certain date regardless of the temperature.
I would’ve enjoyed my stay a lot more if we’d been able to keep warm in our supposedly heated tent, and if I’d brought more cold weather camping gear and clothing.
Another complaint I have about the tents is that our beds and mattresses were terrible. The beds squeaked every time one of us moved, and the mattresses felt as if they’d arrived in the camp somewhere around 1995.
I get that I’m glamping and thus am not going to have a bed from a 5 star hotel, but I’ve slept far better in a regular cot than I did those squeaky beds and thin mattresses where I felt every coil and lump.
U.S. Campground Reviews
Wherever you’re planning to go camping, be sure to check out our interactive map of kid-friendly campgrounds first!
Camp Curry Amenities
Camp Curry isn’t just a place to stay overnight, and there are clearly many visitors who come for a complete vacation based here.
Because of that, you’ll find plenty of amenities that make this more like your typical KOA than a state park.
Wifi
The tent rental technically comes with wifi, and there was even a wifi code written on my registration materials.
That being said, I tried to get the wifi to work near the tent, and it wouldn’t ever connect, despite my best efforts.
Thankfully, I didn’t need the wifi that much—just to keep up with some emails from back home—but keep that in mind if you’re going to visit here and will need to stay connected.
I was able to get the free wifi working near the registration office, and there are benches outside if you needed to work.
Bear Boxes
Outside of each tent is a bear box for you to put your toiletries, perfumes, snacks, and drinks in.
The bears at Yosemite National Park had gotten far too friendly with visitors—to the point where there was even a bear feeding show in the park at one point!—and were breaking into cars and cabins.
About 25 years ago, there was a huge push from the NPS to keep the bears wild and discourage them from scavenging food from humans.
The bear boxes you see here today are a result of that push, and it has helped deter a new generation of bears from seeing human snacks and drinks as a food source.
The boxes also help keep mice out of your tent, which, honestly, is a much more likely possibility.
Put everything that has a smell into the bear boxes and ensure that it is closed tightly. Our box was big enough to put our toiletries, small 10 quart cooler, extra sodas and juice boxes, and 2 reusable bags filled with peanut butter, bread, fruit, and chips.
Bath Houses
The tents themselves do not have ensuite bathrooms, so you’re dependent on the provided bath houses placed around Camp Curry.
I’ve used worse bath houses, and I’ve used better than what’s available here.
Similar to the tents, the bath houses were clean and functional, but basic and a bit out of date.
We often had to punch and repunch the bathroom code into the provided key pad, as the buttons were temperamental and didn’t always want to work.
This was true of several of the bath houses that we used throughout our stay, and I also saw other guests struggling with the same issue.
For the number of cabins and tents using the bath houses, I think it would be nice to have at least a couple more provided around the property. There were several times where we went into the bath houses, and every sink and every shower was being used.
Pool
A pool was about the last thing that I thought was going to be available to us inside a national park, but Yosemite Valley has a couple, including at Camp Curry.
Usually, it’s open from Memorial Day to Labor Day.
However, we visited right after Memorial Day and the pool was still undergoing work for the season, so your mileage may vary on this amenity being available.
Bike rentals
If you don’t want to use the shuttles to get around Yosemite Valley, bikes would be a great alternative.
There’s a multi-use trail that connects many of the most popular areas in the valley, and we saw many people using bikes during our stay.
You can rent both kid and adult bikes from the kiosk near the visitors center, and then pick the actual bike up from the large lot near the shopping and dining area at Curry Village.
Shuttle Stop
Curry Village and Camp Curry are so popular that this area of the park has not just one, but two, shuttle stops.
One heads east around the valley, and the other heads west, so make sure you’re getting on the right shuttle or it will be a long loop backtracking!
(About an hour, in fact.)
The shuttle stops are on either side of the road out in front of the registration area, adjacent to the Apple Tree Orchard parking lot.
Dining options at Curry Village
We loved the convenience of Curry Village, as it gave us a place to sleep, eat, shop, and hike in close proximity.
There are a couple of dining options at Curry Village:
the Taqueria,
the Pizza Deck,
Bar 1899, and
the Dining Pavilion.
We tried all of these but the Taqueria and enjoyed what we ordered.
The pizza from the Pizza Deck had a long wait, but the pies were delicious. We also got fries from Bar 1899, which were a big hit with my kids.
The Dining Pavilion has many options, as it’s set up food court-style. You’ll find everything from cereal to pasta bowls here.
What to Bring to Camp Curry
Mule deer just outside of Camp Curry
Don’t do what we did and come unprepared for the realities of Camp Curry. It’s not like a hotel or a more upscale glamping experience, so you’ll want to pack more than I did. (Oops.)
Warm socks
If you are visiting Camp Curry when the temperatures drop, you’ll be glad of this extra layer on your feet.
I prefer wool socks, like the Darn Tough padded hiking socks, which wick away moisture while still keeping my feet nice and toasty.
Yes, they’re expensive, but they are durable. I’ve had most of my pairs for over 4 years, and they’re still going strong.
Shower shoes
While the Camp Curry bathrooms did look and feel clean, I’m still not going into any shared bathroom without shower shoes on.
You can wear any flip flop or waterproof sandal to accomplish this, but I prefer the Crocs women’s classic sandal. I bought a pair of these 2 summers ago while we were camping in Maine, and they’ve been to many campgrounds with me since.
I love that the material doesn’t soak up any water or deform when it gets wet. There aren’t any buckles to run, or small straps or decorations to break.
They were one of the first things that I packed for our trip to California, since I knew we were staying in a couple of glamping tents along the way.
Bath caddy or toiletries case
We already had a travel toiletries case with us since our stop in Yosemite was part of a much longer 2 week road trip through California, but if you’re coming here directly from your house, add this to your luggage.
You will need to haul your toothbrush and toothpaste, shower stuff, and other getting ready items to and from your tent, as the bath houses can be a short walk from your tent.
Be sure you don’t drop anything or leave anything behind in the bath house with some sort of organizer.
When we’re camping normally, we use a large mesh bath caddy to keep everything we need.
But for this trip, that didn’t quite work for the many hotels and campgrounds we were visiting, so I used a hanging travel organizer for our toiletries and travel sized bottles.
Bath towel
While you do get bedding included in your stay, you do not get towels, and you’ll need to bring some with you to Camp Curry.
Since we were flying in for this road trip, space was at a premium (though it also is in our Winnebago Micro Minnie 1800BH, so nothing’s changed there!).
I brought along some of our colorful Turkish towels that have been a mainstay in our camping gear for years now.
Head lamp
There are a few street lights placed throughout the camp, but you’re going to want more than that to get to the bathroom and restaurants at night.
A head lamp is so helpful, and it’s lightweight enough to throw in your luggage, even if you’re flying in.
We have these bright head lamps, which rotate down and have a red light option.
Hot Hands/Feet
If you’re prone to getting cold while you’re sleeping (like me), I recommend bringing along some Hot Hands hand warmers. They’re non-electric, so you don’t need to worry about plugging anything in regularly, and they last for hours once activated.
When we’ve been camping in the late fall, I’ve even worn my gloves to sleep in with some of these tucked in. I’ll also pop on into my beanie to keep my head warm!
There are also Foot Warmers, which are larger and have adhesive in them so you can stick them to your socks or shoe soles.
Beanie
Wearing a beanie is another way that helps me stay warm when camping in the cooler months.
I wish I’d had a beanie with me during those chilly nights at Camp Curry since I do get chilled so easily.
When I’m sleeping in a beanie, I like ones that don’t have a cuff, as they’re more comfortable to me.
Sleeping bag
Having a sleeping bag to curl up in would’ve gone a long way to helping us better regulate our body temperatures in the tent each night.
That being said, it wasn’t particularly practical for my to haul our sleeping bags cross country since checked bags are so expensive.
But, if I’d had an easy way to get sleeping bags to the tent, I would’ve loved to have them.
You would be a lot more comfortable in a 15-20 degree sleeping bag than trying to wrestle the thin sheets and slippery Rumpl blanket provided.
I have a Nemo Endless Promise down bag that I use when we’re tent camping in the colder months in South Carolina, and it is quite toasty.
Ear Plugs
I am a very light sleeper, so ear plugs go a long way in helping me get a good night’s sleep when I’m traveling.
The Camp Curry tents are close enough together that you can hear other guests snoring and walking around.
If you think that will bother you, I recommend bringing along a pair or two of these soft foam ear plugs.
They don’t ever hurt my ears that way that some of the other foam ear plugs do, and they’re cheap enough that you can bring several pairs on your trip without worrying about losing them.
Final Thoughts on Staying in Camp Curry
It’s hard to be upset when you’ve got views like this outside of your tent.
You truly cannot beat the location of Camp Curry, and its history and cute vibes make it highly sought after by visitors.
If you lean into the rustic nature of the tents and come prepared for the overnight weather, it can be a lot of fun!
Plus, having so many restaurants and shopping options within a 5 minute walk makes this a great hub, and the fact that you’re connected to the entire valley by free shuttle means you can truly park and stay in the Yosemite bubble.
It is expensive for what you’re getting, but that’s the case anywhere near Yosemite National Park.
Overall, I’m glad we tried this option out for our time in Yosemite, and I hope to return again soon (but next time more prepared for a cold front!).
