If the crowd calendar is a 6 and that park (AK) has early morning hours that day, do you still avoid it (if we don’t do the early morning hour)? All the other parks are higher crowd levels (8 and 9s). So how do you pick which park in this case?
I read that the general rule is that you avoid the park with early hours if you aren’t doing the early hour yourself as the park will be crowded from the beginning and throughout the day. Does this apply to all the parks?
And why is the crowd level the lowest for that day of all the four parks if that is the one park with early morning hours? A 6 instead of 8/9s like the other parks? Does that make sense?
Trying to plan our trip and the latest crowd update all increased crowd levels across the board
Yes it applies to all parks generally.
I hope this makes sense - no matter what the crowd level, the first hour will be fairly light crowds (relatively speaking). So even on a 9 day you can still do maybe 3 rides with very short waits. If you arrive at 9am for a park that had EMH at 8am though, there are thousands of people already in the park and in line, so you’re missing the advantage of that first hour.
Having said all that, with FOP still sucking up most of the visitors in AK, you may still find reasonably short waits elsewhere in the park even if you miss out on EMH. But EMH at AK tends to be high crowds because people hope for an advantage riding FOP. So it could go either way.
I’m just going to add that I pay no attention to crowd levels at all in my planning - they are estimates and can be up to 2 levels wrong in either direction. So your 6 could well end up being an 8 anyway. Equally your 8 could end up being a 6. With a touring plan, 8s and 9s are nothing to worry about.