Trafficking in Yosemite
by Alex Hawes
When President Theodore Roosevelt journeyed to Yosemite National Park in May 1903, he asked John Muir to be his guide. Muir, founder of the Sierra Club and acclaimed "father of the National Parks," smuggled Roosevelt away for two nights beneath the stars and sequoias. Roosevelt reminisced fondly on African safaris; Muir delighted the President by pointing out marmots and pine martens. "We were in a snowstorm last night, and it was just what I wanted!" exclaimed Roosevelt to reporters on the third day.
But as the party descended into the renowned lower valley from higher elevations, the President’s mood quickly changed. At the summit of Nevada Fall, the two men encountered a throng of handshake-seeking onlookers, whom Roosevelt asked to be dispersed. When Muir and Roosevelt finally reached Bridalveil Meadow on the valley floor, a crowd of a thousand or so people--on horseback, in buggies, and on foot--awaited. "These people annoy me. Can you get rid of them?" the President complained.
Venturing into Yosemite Valley today, one can empathize with Roosevelt for his exasperation. Cars, coaches, and RVs clog the roads and parking lots. Streams of bikers whiz along the shaded trails. Visitors from Tulsa to Tokyo elbow for room to set up tripods. The appearance of a deer at roadside creates instant gridlock.
More than 3.5 million people visited Yosemite National Park last year. The thankless task of defending this national treasure falls to the National Park Service (NPS), whose mandate includes two often contradictory clauses: to protect the cultural heritage and natural beauty of our parks, and to encourage recreational opportunities for visitors there. The Park Service has spun its wheels in the rich Sierra Nevada soil, trying to better balance these two goals. Finally, NPS is calling for action.
On March 27, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt unveiled the long-awaited Yosemite Valley Plan, a measure aimed at limiting infrastructure, reducing congestion, and restoring fragile ecosystems. The details of the plan--which advocates ripping up roads, lodging units, bridges, and parking lots, and may cost more than $300 million and take a decade to implement--are currently available for public review. Campers, chambers of commerce, concessionaires, rock climbers, car apologists, and conservationists now have a chance to respond before any proposals are implemented.
No small task, the Park Service humbly hopes it can save Yosemite from the people, for the people.
The battle over Yosemite began as soon as Abraham Lincoln signed Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoias over to the State of California on June 30, 1864. Private landowners like James Mason Hutchins--leader of the first tourist expedition to Yosemite in 1855--were infuriated to have their claims nullified by the legislation. Hutchins continued to run his famed Upper Hotel, and farm his land, while battling the government in vain to regain legal title to his property. Meanwhile, the park’s popularity as a tourist destination grew, thanks in part to glowing reports by Horace Greeley in the New York Tribune and Thomas Starr King in the Boston Transcript, and to the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869.
A year before the completion of the railroad, a young Wisconsinite, John Muir, turned up in Yosemite Valley after his journey to the Amazon went awry in Cuba. Yosemite’s dizzying topography and "mountains of light" took immediate hold of the amateur geologist and writer.
Muir worked as a sawyer and shepherd for James Mason Hutchins to earn his keep. Yet he detested the idea of the park being logged bare, or grazed by hooved locusts, as he put it. Muir’s writings, which course with passion for the western wilderness, hastened the creation of Yosemite, Grand Canyon, and other national parks. But federal protection of his beloved lands never reassured Muir much. In The Yosemite (1912), Muir railed against the so-called temple destroyers:
...Long ago a few enterprising merchants utilized the Jerusalem temple as a place of business instead of a place of prayer, changing money, buying and selling cattle and sheep and doves; and earlier still, the first forest reservation, including only one tree, was likewise despoiled. Ever since the establishment of the Yosemite National Park, strife has been going on around its borders and I suppose this will go on as part of the universal battle between right and wrong, however much its boundaries may be shorn, or its wild beauty destroyed.Some believe Muir’s death in 1914 resulted partly from his despair over Hetch Hetchy Valley, a landscape within the park only slightly less grandiose than the better-known Yosemite Valley, being turned into a reservoir to satisfy San Francisco’s thirst for water. Today, many worry that Yosemite Valley will follow Hetch Hetchy into obsolescence not from a dam, but from tourist hordes flooding the basin.
While Yosemite National Park covers more land than Rhode Island, most visitors home in on the famed valley. This seven-mile-long, one-mile-wide depression, flanked by granite cliffs, crags, and domes looming as much as 4,000 feet above the valley floor, is familiar to many before they even visit. The paintings of Albert Bierstadt and the photographs of Carleton E. Watkins and Ansel Adams have seared this landscape into the American self-portrait. Forged by glaciation and time, Half Dome, Cathedral Peaks, and El Capitan represent our nation’s Taj Mahal, our Eiffel Tower, our Great Wall. Visitors here are pilgrims seeking the West's natural shrine.
But over the last century, park managers have stood by as these same tourists polluted with their cars; eroded riverbanks while traversing roads and bridges; slept in campgrounds encroaching on sensitive communities of California black oak and hastening the retreat of more than 90 percent of the park’s native wet meadows; fished streams stocked for their pleasure with exotic brown trout, which now outnumber native rainbow trout; and added two decibels to the park’s background noise levels.
The National Park Service has historically tolerated forms of recreation that might undermine the health of America’s protected lands. The agency’s unstated philosophy held that the only way to gain public support for national parks was to entertain the public with few limitations. By the 1970s, Yosemite’s guardians had begun to rethink this relationship between tourist and land. In 1980, after six years of deliberation and public input, the Park Service released a General Management Plan (GMP) for Yosemite, with the explicit goals of reclaiming priceless beauty, reducing traffic congestion, limiting crowding, allowing natural processes to prevail, and promoting visitor understanding and enjoyment.
However that same year Ronald Reagan became President, the priority of the Interior Department shifted instead to privatizing park operations, and attempts to put the GMP’s vision into practice stalled.
Now, 20 years later, the park staff at Yosemite are giving it another shot. In December 1998, Secretary Bruce Babbitt announced that NPS would wrap together studies targeting housing, concessions, parking, and river management into one comprehensive work: the Yosemite Valley Plan. Park staff have been fine-tuning a draft of the plan ever since.
More than politics, however, a catastrophe of biblical proportions--which some view as a godsend--provided the true impetus for action. In 1997, there came a flood.
Mary Kline holds her hand sideways, touching the bridge of her nose just below her glasses. "The water level was this high on January 2nd, 1997," she tells the tourist crowd listening to her talk on Yosemite’s future. Clad in NPS earth tones, Kline is standing in the Merced River floodplain, in what was until three years ago the Upper River Campground. After the New Year’s 1997 floodwaters washed away both the Upper River and Lower River campsites, the U.S. Congress and the National Park Service had an excuse to do something different. Or in the case of the campgrounds, to do nothing at all.
"Some people who have been camping here since they were seven years old want their campsite back," says Kline, branch chief in the park’s Division of Interpretation. However the Park Service is not proposing to replace many facilities destroyed by the flood, but to tear up even more campsites. The rare oak woodland habitat, which the campgrounds had supplanted, will then be left to re-grow.
Staff at Yosemite, with the help of biologists from other branches of the federal government, have mapped out the park’s vital habitats and areas of rich biodiversity. Upon this chart of "High Value Resource Areas," one can overlay the potential locations of artificial valley features like campgrounds, cross-referenced with a site’s ecological value. Stretching a multi-colored map wide across the pine needles and oak leaves, Kline points out the park’s options: A lodge could go there, a camp here, there a parking lot. It’s hard to imagine how it all will fit.
"For too long they’ve tried to pack too much into that space," says Jay Watson, western regional director of the Wilderness Society. "You propose moving an outhouse, and someone comes unglued." Watson and members of other conservation groups have closely followed and assisted NPS’s struggle to produce a plan both nurturing to the park’s natural resources and pleasing to the public. Simply put, that means placating fishermen and fish, hikers and plants, rafters and rivers, picnickers and bears.
Since the release of the 1980 GMP, the number of visitors to the park--then 2.3 million a year--has increased by more than half. No matter how well-behaved, crowds of this size inevitably disrupt the lives of Yosemite’s more than 230 species of birds, 80 species of mammals, and 1,400 species of shrubs, trees, and flowering plants--not to mention less noticeable microfauna which can wind up on the soles of one’s hiking boots.
Some species--from Steller’s jays and California ground squirrel, to American black bears--react too well to human visitation. Bears, not surprisingly, present the most daunting challenge, if not to personal safety then to personal property. Black bears (Ursus americanus) caused over $650,000 in damage in 1998, mainly to cars smashed open for food by these midnight marauders. Of the park’s estimated 400 to 500 black bears, 15 or so regularly roam the narrow valley itself during summer months, drawn into this unusual density by the smell of hamburgers, hot dogs, and even mosquito repellant. Once locked onto a promising scent, a bear can break in and out of an automobile in under two minutes. Repeat success makes them bolder.
"They’re just being bears—it’s hard to blame them," says Christine Cowles of Yosemite’s Public Information Office. When Congress approved a $500,000 appropriation to reduce bear-human interactions in Yosemite, the target of the bill was not the bears, but the humans. Careless food storage--or outright luring of bears into camp for sightings--foolishly encourages "junk-food bears," park staff argue. NPS has used the Congressional funding to send more rangers into campgrounds to talk about food storage, with surprising success. The number of bear incidents dropped by 50 percent, and property damage by 66 percent, between 1998 and 1999.
No black bear has ever killed a human in the history of Yosemite. Nonetheless, each year park staff must lethally inject a few bears that have grown too aggressive for comfort. Despite the apparent success of the public outreach program, four bears were euthanized in 1999.
More troubling is the plight of species whose entire regional populations have suffered from human enterprise. Early settlers in the Sierra Nevada hunted the California population of grizzly, or brown bear (Ursus arctos horribilis) to extinction by the early 1920s--that creature’s silhouetted image on the state flag is left as a bitter reminder--and substituted the now endangered Sierra Nevada bighorn sheep (Ovis canadensis californiana) with domestic sheep throughout much of their alpine terrain (see May/June 1999 ZooGoer). Modern threats to wildlife in Yosemite are often more subtle. A recent census revealed that the park’s amphibian populations have plummeted, likely due to causes that extend far beyond the park boundaries, such as pollution and global warming.
But visitors have a negative impact too. Automobiles are a significant cause of mortality here for small carnivores like the Pacific fisher (Martes pennanti), according to Jan Van Wagtendonk of the U.S. Geological Survey. "We found more dead ones than live ones," says Van Wagtendonk of a recent census of the fisher population. Traffic also threatens the great gray owl (Strix nebulosa), another rare species. These birds fly low to the ground in search of prey—tuning in to the sound of rodents, tuning out the sound of oncoming vehicles. The park has lowered speed limits in an effort to protect owls and other wildlife. But as long as there are roads, there will be collisions.
People overrun wildlife along the banks of streams and ponds too. These riparian habitats--crossroads for creatures above and below the surface--react dramatically to environmental change, both global and local. Ice Age cooling killed off most of Yosemite’s fish, save the rainbow trout. Late 19th-century settlers rejected nature’s hand, and began restocking the streams with brook trout, Dolly Varden, cutthroat trout, and others. The California Department of Fish and Game later dropped young fingerlings into Yosemite’s lakes by airplane. The alien fish proceeded to eat away at native species of aquatic life.
Not until the 1970s did the Park Service stop "planting" fish. But the natural rhythms of the Merced River--the lifeblood of the valley--still suffer from human efforts. Like any river, the Merced tends to migrate during changing climatic conditions. Yet the Park Service has armored the Merced’s banks in place to protect the historic bridges that span the river and the popular campgrounds that abut it. The Yosemite Valley Plan proposes removing a dam and three bridges along the Merced to allow the river to run deeper and colder, permitting native aquatic wildlife to recover.
The river would also run swifter, however, potentially making swimming and rafting more dangerous. And park rangers know from experience that visitors are loath to sacrifice recreation for restoration.
Back in Muir’s day, as now, people entertained themselves in odd ways--including tossing objects off cliffs to test how long they took to disappear from view. Guests at the Mountain House, a lodge overlooking Glacier Point, would throw rocks and empty boxes off the 3,250-foot cliff. The lodge’s owner, James McCauley, would then appear, and shock the audience by launching a hen. "Don’t be alarmed about that chicken, ladies. She’s used to it. She goes over that cliff every day during the season," he would explain. Sure enough, the hen would soon be spotted on the summit trail, heading home.
McCauley graduated to catapulting embers of red fir bark as part of the infamous "Yosemite Firefalls"--a nightly attraction that the Park Service itself continued until 1968, before thinking better of the gratuitous stunt. Instead, Yosemite rangers must contend today with visitors tossing themselves off the high cliffs.
Last summer, a man illegally "BASE" jumped--parachuting from land rather than from an airplane--off the lip of El Capitan. Rangers spotted the parachutist in the air, and chased after him once he landed. To avoid a modest fine the man sprinted off, jumped in the roaring Merced River, and drowned. This past fall, another BASE jumper--poised high above a large assemblage of rangers and reporters--dove off El Capitan. Her chute failed to open.
The woman had staged the jump to protest the Park Service’s prohibition of her hobby. Legal challenges to the Yosemite Valley Plan are all but inevitable, given that each patch of the valley has its fervent advocates, and each recreational activity its disciples. Not surprisingly, the issue likely to arouse the most ire is an icon even more American than El Cap--the Car.
Simple math illustrates the quandary: A seven-square-mile valley, with 10,000 visitors arriving each summer day in 2,000 cars and buses, circling a single loop road with a decreed maximum of 1,271 parking spaces, creates one big mess. National parks, from Acadia to Zion, have introduced shuttle buses to reduce congestion. The Park Service at Yosemite hopes to join the trend by reducing personal vehicles in the heart of the valley.
The Department of Transportation and the National Park Service have joined to help form the Yosemite Area Regional Transportation Strategy (YARTS). Under YARTS, a fleet of more than 100 buses this May will begin shuttling day visitors into Yosemite from massive staging areas in gateway communities like Mariposa and Lee Vining. The buses, running on diesel initially, but natural gas eventually, will reduce not only pollution but traffic.
The Yosemite Valley Plan proposes to supplement YARTS by adding an additional 1,600 parking spaces inside the park, but outside the valley. The plan also recommends converting a section of the valley’s Northside Drive into a bike path. Some Yosemite staff privately hope cars will some day be banned entirely from the valley. Not everyone is pleased.
Hikers on the shore of Mirror Lake will spot the occasional car parked hundreds of yards past signs ordering no entry. The vehicle likely belongs to an "anti-YARTS," one of a group of citizens in surrounding communities who refuse to surrender their right-to-drive on taxpayer-owned property. Money also feeds the anger. Two neighboring counties, Madera and Tuolumne, have chosen not to participate in the YARTS program for fear of hurting local businesses. Madera County District Supervisor Gary Gilbert maintains that YARTS will penalize people staying outside the park often in far cheaper accommodations because of the four-hour round-trip bus ride that would be required to visit the valley. "If you can afford a $150 or $200 hotel room [in the valley] and eat in their restaurants, then I guess you’re welcome in Yosemite," says Gilbert.
But it is an unlikely adversary, the Sierra Club--founded in part by John Muir himself--that has created the greatest legal obstacle to the Yosemite Valley Plan’s progress. At issue is road-widening on highways leading into the park. The Park Service failed to generate an Environmental Impact Study for construction on Highway 140, which runs adjacent to the Merced River. The Sierra Club sued NPS over blasting and clear-cutting along the highway’s shoulder. A federal judge ruled in the Sierra Club’s favor, finding that the Park Service violated the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act. Implementation of the Yosemite Valley Plan, and all its various components, cannot proceed until the Park Service concludes a management plan for the river itself, by a July 2000 deadline.
According to Christine Cowles, the Merced River Plan and the Yosemite Valley Plan will each mandate that a 150-foot buffer zone exist along the Merced’s banks. Not only will the popular riverside campgrounds become relegated to history, but no new buildings will ever stand alongside the mighty Merced.
Sierra Club representatives remain wary, however, of the Park Service’s plans to continue road construction along the Merced, and to add lodging units within the valley to compensate for the reduction in campsites. The Sierra Club doesn’t want NPS to act in haste; others feel that 20 years is long enough.
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Walking today through the Mariposa Grove, where Muir and Roosevelt discussed conservation by campfire, one comes across a giant sequoia lying on its side. It is the Wawona Tunnel Tree, a sober reminder of past sacrifices to the gods of recreation. In 1881, Henry Washburn of the Wawona Hotel Company paid two men to hollow out the base of this glorious monarch, 26 feet in diameter, so that people could drive through in their stagecoaches. Tunneling out the trunk, however, cut into the tree’s expansive but shallow root system.
The Wawona tree had survived epic fires and the weathering of more than 20 centuries. But in the winter of 1969, the giant finally toppled from the weight of snow--and our need for gimmicks. The National Park Service disavows such crass amusements now, but as long as the agency remains federally run, and federally funded, it must at least bend to the will of the people.
Today, smiling tourists pose by the Wawona tree, dwarfed
by its mammoth, rotting trunk. They snap a few frames and
then return to their cars, heading for the valley.
Park Problems Hit Close To Home
-Alex Hawes
ZooGoer 29(3) 2000. Copyright 2000 Friends of the National Zoo. All rights reserved.
