Yosemite Slowdown New river plan must precede one for valley. Fresno Bee - September 24, 1999 This was supposed to be the time for the National Park Service finally to unveil its new plan to decongest Yosemite Valley. Sadly, the Park Service will miss yet another of its deadlines - this time because it failed to comply with a different deadline years ago. The delay is not only frustrating, but makes it virtually impossible for the Clinton administration to implement a new valley plan even if it manages to devise one during the remainder of its tenure. The Park Service can't release its plan for the overall valley because it never devised a management plan one for one of the valley's key components, the Merced River. The Merced winds for 81 miles through the park. Starting from its headwaters near Mount Lyell, the river builds until it cascades in brilliant formations down Nevada and Vernal falls. Below the falls, it boils through giant boulders of granite in Happy Isles until it reaches the valley, where it alternates in quiet and thunderous stretches until it reaches El Portal, where the river leaves the boundaries of the park. Congress in 1987 declared the Merced a wild and scenic river, and instructed the Park Service to draft a management plan for it. There are plenty of planning issues related to this river. Accommodations ranging from Yosemite Lodge to Housekeeping - the tenement campground with all the charm of a refugee center - are within the Merced's floodplain. It makes sense to devise a river management plan that decides where civilization must retreat from the river's path before embarking on a broader strategy for the valley. In fact, Congress back in 1987 ordered the Park Service to complete a such a plan by 1990. The Park Service did not. It thought that other planning efforts would suffice. It thought wrong. Nature planted the seeds of today's planning debacle when she implemented her own management strategy in the form of a historic flood in January 1997, flooding Housekeeping, part of the Lodge complex and other river campgrounds. As part of the clean-up effort, the Park Service decided to widen the road to El Portal, which has numerous curvy stretches where buses can't safely pass one another. The Sierra Club, against the road widening, sued, challenging that the widening was inconsistent with the river management plan because there simply wasn't one. A federal judge has agreed, halting part of the road project and the entire valley planning process until the Park Service comes up with a river management plan. A draft of the management plan will be out this winter. A draft of the valley plan, this spring. If, that is, the Park Service makes the deadlines. Though the delays are frustrating for all involved, if they yield a better valley plan, the delays may even be worth it.