A lot has changed since 2014. Back in the old Saddle Rd days, very few tourists ventured to the visitors center, and even fewer to the summit, mostly because visitors were not allowed by rental car companies to drive on Saddle Rd - there were even threads on this forum on how to drive Saddle Rd, along with debates on why visitors should or should be doing so. Way back then I took one tour with Hawai'i Forest and Trail, then on subsequent visits just drove myself, but usually in a regular sedan or SUV, or a 4WD if we were able to get one. I knew how to do the drive and make it down safely, but there accidents because other people did not. I took Saddle Rd many an afternoon and night in the dark when the road was covered in pea soup fog and I had to inch along at 5MPH because you literally could not see the road or the edges or were able to tell if you were still on the road except by feel.

Fast forward to the completion of the Saddle Rd re-alignment to Hwy 200, and that opened access to every visitor and rental car on the Kohala coast, along with Kona town - and the change was a sudden influx of tourists to the visitors center, and more attempts to drive the summit by a motley collection of convertibles, sedans, SUVs, 4WD and others - with resulting chaos, crowding and accidents on the road. So, the decision was made to crack down and limit access to actual 4WD cars and drivers who knew how to operate them. I am not sure if the new procedures around forcing acclimation and doing checks for children and pregnant women are new, or have been around since the new rules because this was our first drive up since the ranger checks started.

When I first started going to the visitor's center years ago, I would park in the small side lot to acclimate and eat dinner, and the only other vehicles were the tour vans and maybe a couple other self-drive tourists. On the way down we would stop back at the visitor's center to view the telescopes and I could still find a spot in the side lot. Once Hwy 200 was finished, the next time we went there, it was total chaos with people parking everywhere (the new lot wasn't totally finished yet), crawling on everything, lining up 20 deep to look through a telescope, a traffic jam snaking its way up to the summit, plus the chaos once you got to the summit with dozens of people taking the trail up to what is the holiest site in Polynesia, and desecrating it with trash, loud talking, selfies, stone piles, etc.

In the end, something had to be done - and today's reality is the result.