Politics in Paradise

Yosemite bedeviled by crowds, plans, pollution, overseers

by Carl Nolte
San Francisco Chronicle - June 6, 2004

Springtime is a wonder in Yosemite: The dogwood is in full flower, the waterfalls are booming, the mountains are still kissed with the last snows of winter, and the air is full of harsh words.

Yosemite is one of the most beautiful places on Earth. "No temple made with hands can compare with Yosemite,'' said John Muir. But its politics are among the toughest in the country.

Yosemite is run by the National Park Service, in the public view, kindly men and women who wear Smokey Bear hats and give nature lectures around campfires in the summer.

The reality is a bit different. The park service is charged with both preserving the natural wonders in their care for future generations and making them accessible for the enjoyment of the public.

The top job in Yosemite can be a career wrecker -- there have been four superintendents of Yosemite National Park in six years.

In 2002, David Mihalic resigned from the park service rather than accept a transfer to a new assignment he felt was rife with political pressure. His predecessor, Stanley Albright, was forced into retirement in 1999 on direct orders of Bruce Babbitt, Secretary of the Interior in the Clinton administration.

Albright got the ax because Babbitt thought he was acting too slowly to implement a general management plan that has been in the works for years.

The present superintendent, a tall rangy park service veteran named Michael Tollefson, who started in January 2003, is under court order to stop work implementing that same plan. One superintendent was forced out for going too slow; the incumbent is in the soup for going too fast.

Nobody likes to hear about plans; planners are thought to be cautious men and women, careful people, a bit dull. When things get tough, the public prefers someone like Arnold Schwarzenegger to, say, Gray Davis.

Most people yawned when the National Park Service announced in the fall of 1997 that "The long-awaited Draft Yosemite Valley Implementation Plan (VIP) is finally here!'' But the heart of the plan is of major importance: the future of Yosemite National Park.

Yosemite is spectacular, a national treasure. The first tourists came in 1855, only four years after European Americans first laid eyes on the place and took it away from the Indians.

They have been coming in growing numbers ever since -- 3,475,315 people visited Yosemite last year. Most of the visitors crowded into Yosemite Valley, which is only four miles long and rimmed by sheer cliffs. Two years ago, 711,711 visitors -- nearly as many as the entire population of San Francisco -- came to Yosemite in the month of August, a record for a single month.

Yosemite National Park is bigger than Rhode Island, and more than 94 percent of it is wilderness, but only 1.3 percent of the visitors camped out there overnight last year. More than 60 percent of the 3.4 million visitors last year came from Northern California.

It doesn't take a genius to see the problem: If the National Parks are America's treasures, and Yosemite is among the crown jewels, shouldn't Americans be allowed to visit them?

But huge jumps in the population have raised critical questions: How will the people get to the park, how will they get around, and where will they stay?

Should visitation be limited? Should hotels be banned? Should Yosemite be rationed?

And now the world is closing in.

The University of California is building a new campus at Merced, the valley town that is one of the gateways to Yosemite. The town's population is expected to double.

Fresno, less than 100 miles from Yosemite's southern border, is now larger than St. Louis. The smog in Fresno County is the second worst in the United States, and in April, the Environmental Protection Agency said Yosemite's air did not meet minimum federal standards.

Highway 41, the southern entrance to the park, is lined by billboards, fast food joints, and a gambling casino not far from the park boundary. "When I saw that,'' said a Los Angeles visitor who had not been in Yosemite for 40 years, "I knew we weren't in the wilderness any more.''

Yet, once in the park, the magic of the place makes the cares of outside world drop away, in Muir's phrase, "like autumn leaves.''

In springtime, the sun lights up the trees on small islands in the Merced River, and the morning sun melts the ice that still forms around the face of the cliff at Yosemite Falls.

All morning in spring, pieces of ice fall off the cliff with a crash. The spring winds cause the falls to sway back and forth, like a curtain. Some falls, like the 1,612 foot Ribbon Fall near El Capitan, only run in the spring. They dry up after the last snow melts in summer.

When the moon is bright, the spray from Yosemite Falls even forms rainbows at night: blue, silver and white, every color but the brightest. They call this the moonbow, and it only happens in spring.

"I've never seen dogwood in bloom like this,'' said David Porter, a visitor from El Sobrante, who was walking at Curry Village in April. "Just breathing the air is healing.''

The dogwood flowers fade away from Yosemite Valley by mid-May, but springtime moves up the mountains in slow waves as the snow melts. When it is deep summer in the valley, it is springtime in the high country. Spring in Yosemite lasts for months if you know how to follow the weather.

"This is one of my favorite seasons,'' said Brett Archer, the manager of Curry Village, who has lived in the valley for nearly 20 years. "Spring is a rebirth,'' he said. "The sky is a turquoise blue. It can't get any better than that.''

"My complaint,'' said the late environmentalist David Brower, who knew Yosemite better than perhaps any man, "is that it is too damn beautiful.''

The valley has a pull that brings people back, year after year. Karen Dwyer, who is from Burbank, and her friend, Jennifer Delaney, come every year in the third week of April. They bring their families and their friends, and the friends of friends. This April they reserved 35 cabins a year in advance. There were more than a hundred people in their group.

"Our parents started the tradition,'' said Delaney, "My mother came up to Yosemite the April she was pregnant with me. I came up here the spring I was pregnant with my own child.''

She and her family stood on the bridge just below Yosemite Falls, with the mist blowing in their faces.

The park service and the Yosemite Fund have been working on the valley, redoing the entrance to the trail that leads to the base of the falls. The two women say they like the changes, which they call improvements.

Change is a tough word in Yosemite. Many people don't want to see it -- don't want to see a single tree cut, don't want another hotel room built, a road widened, pavement expanded.

"One of the problems with Yosemite,'' said former Interior boss Babbitt in an interview several years ago, "is that everybody in San Francisco thinks they own it.''

The park service wants to relocate roads and expand the Yosemite Lodge. Some of the lodge buildings were destroyed in a flood in 1997. The park service wants a lodge that has more rooms than it has now, but fewer rooms than it had before the flood.

The numbers game is difficult to follow; one of the problems with the plan is that it seems to provide for more motel-style rooms and fewer campgrounds.

Right now, there are 1,260 hotel and cabin rooms in the valley, from the luxurious Ahwahnee Hotel (123 rooms) to the plain-as-dirt housekeeping camp (264 rustic shelters). The park's hotels and restaurants are run by Delaware North, which also runs concessions in Yellowstone, Sequoia and Kings Canyon parks.

There are 464 campsites in Yosemite Valley, accommodating 2,736 campers - - but there is a world of difference between the elegant Ahwahnee, where gentlemen are asked to wear coats and ties at dinner, and Camp Four, where tough rock climbers sleep on the ground and eat out of steel cups.

It is tough to accommodate both groups. Maybe impossible.

The park service's opponents say the general management plan, developed over more than 20 years and based on compromise, is really a plan to spread development, build hotel rooms, put in satellite parking lots.

The park service insists that moving roads around is good for the park -- that it improves the visitor experience -- that considering satellite parking lots in the western edge of the valley makes it possible to ban most cars from the heart of the valley. It is the opposite of development, the park service says.

The argument is sometimes hard to follow, based on numbers that change depending on who is doing the counting. But the rhetoric can be stark and nasty.

Brower himself, who co-founded a group called Friends of Yosemite Valley, said before he died nearly four years ago that the management plan would mean "converting this temple into a profit center, with pricey hotels, scant campground accommodations, wider roads to field bigger diesel buses..."

He called those responsible "criminals.'' The planners, he said, should be put in jail.

The Friends of Yosemite Valley, a small group based in and near the park, took the park service to court, and lost. However, in April, when crews hired by the park service started cutting down tall pine trees and incense cedars to expand the Yosemite Lodge, the group won. They got an injunction from the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco to stop the work.

Further, the court declared the comprehensive plan for managing the Merced River -- one of the key parts of the whole planning process -- was invalid.

It was a crushing blow to the planners, and to most mainline conservation groups, who favor the management plan as the best hope for limiting development and crowding in Yosemite.

The day the work was stopped, said Jay Watson of the Wilderness Society, "cast a dark cloud over Yosemite.'' The park, he said, "had a cursed history of tortured decision-making and administrative gridlock.''

Glaciers formed Yosemite, he noted, "and change moves at a glacial pace.''

The park service was left with a public relations disaster -- a stalled plan and a field full of tree stumps. The court acted on April 21, John Muir's birthday.

The next day -- Earth Day -- Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton visited Yosemite to talk about repairing the park's infrastructure, cleaning the air, and praising national parks as "such wonderful treasures.''

"The park staff has been doing wonderful things, here at Yosemite," she said. "I've been impressed with their work. "The management plan, she said, "seems to me like a very good plan. ...We will be in court, trying to move forward."

She spoke softly, so that most of her words were drowned out by the thunder of Yosemite Falls.

Once, on a spring evening 101 years ago, John Muir was invited by the president of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, to go camping with him in Yosemite. The men talked around the campfire far into the night, and on the trail much of the day. Muir was concerned then that Yosemite Valley was being mismanaged and that more of the Sierra needed federal protection.

In the spring of this year, as April turned into May, as the first wildflowers poked up in the meadows and the snows of winter melted away, two reporters with a week off duty headed up from State Highway 41, up along the south rim of Yosemite Valley along some of the route taken by Muir and Teddy Roosevelt a century before.

They paused less than a mile from where they'd parked the car, among the camera-carrying tourists and the big buses and motor homes. Looking back over the valley, they could not see a building, a single mark that any human had ever been in the valley.

The next day, they walked along the rim of the valley, crossed Bridalveil Creek, then camped for the night at the edge of the cliff where Sentinel Creek drops 2,000 feet. They had spent a whole day on the rim of one of the most famous and crowded mountain valleys in the world and had not seen a single person.

Muir was right, they thought. Nothing could compare to Yosemite, and no season could compare to springtime.