Draft plan reduces the number of cars in Yosemite Valley By Mike Lewis The Fresno Bee - March 28, 2000 PLAN HIGHLIGHTS Among the provisions of the $343 million Draft Yosemite Valley Management Plan: Reduce the number of Yosemite Valley campsites from 475 to 465. Reduce valley lodging from 1,260 units to 981 by removing cabins at Curry Village and Housekeeping Camp. Yosemite Lodge would be allowed to replace more than 100 units lost in a 1997 flood, bringing the number of rooms to 387. Reduce traffic in the valley from 7,200 vehicles a day to 3,080 and reduce employee housing from 1,277 beds to 683. Remove roads through Stoneman and Ahwahnee meadows, including the road through the former Upper and Lower River campgrounds. Remove one or more bridges at Stoneman Meadow and at the housekeeping units. Move the park operation building and the concessions management office to a location outside the valley. Convert administration buildings into a natural history museum and expanded cultural center. Remove several historic structures, including the original superintendent's house, to re-establish an oak grove. Reduce in-valley parking from 1,500 spaces to a single 550-car lot and a transit center at Yosemite Village. A total of 1,550 spaces with shuttle service in the valley floor would be built at Crane Flat, El Portal and Badger Pass. Replace 40 campsites east of Curry Village for groups and backpackers and add 28 walk-up sites at Camp Four, 45 walk-in sites in the Upper Pines area and 20 walk-in sites along Tenaya Creek. Move all campsites away from the Merced River. Restore large tracts of meadow, riparian and California black oak groves along the Merced River from Clark's Bridge downstream to Camp Six. A 150-foot-wide protection zone would be imposed along most of the river and almost all development moved outside that zone. Remove commercial trail rides from the valley. SAN FRANCISCO -- Turning back the car culture that popularized Yosemite Valley while degrading its beauty, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt unveiled a proposed valley management plan Monday that seeks to radically reduce the number of automobiles allowed into the heart of the national park. The draft plan, made public at a news conference in San Francisco following a speech by Babbitt, also would move hundreds of employees to lodging outside the valley while reshaping roads and reducing campgrounds to let the Merced River more closely run the course it carved for itself before naturalists and Winnebagos settled in the valley. Babbitt and the environmental groups he has long sparred with over the correct way to manage the park hailed the plan as a vast improvement over current park management. "The problem isn't that there are too many people in the valley but too many cars," Babbitt said. Under the draft plan, expected to cost approximately $343 million to fully implement, the Interior Department would reduce the existing 1,500 parking spaces in the valley to a consolidated 550-space lot at Yosemite Village. The department would then build three shuttle-served parking lots on Yosemite's exterior ring at Badger Pass, El Portal and Crane Flat with a total of 1,550 spaces -- a net increase in parking. Yosemite officials said the reduced Valley parking would lower day-use traffic in the Valley by 60% on peak summer days. From the parking lots, the shuttles would run every 12 to 15 minutes. Jay Watson of the Wilderness Society praised the plan as a dramatic step beyond earlier park-management proposals, which he and other environmentalists had criticized as inadequate to protect Yosemite, one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world with 2.5 million annual visitors. "The plan emphasizes conservation and park protection," said Watson, who helped negotiate the draft. "I think a 60% reduction in traffic will change the face of Yosemite." The park also would cut nearly in half the number of park employees who live in the valley. Along with Superintendent Dave Mihalic, who was brought in specifically to see the draft to completion, 700 park employees will be relocated to lodging outside 7-mile-long, 1-mile-wide granite-framed Yosemite Valley, an area roughly the size of Manhattan's Central Park but as Babbitt dryly noted, "more developed." The park superintendent's home, staff headquarters, housekeeping, concessioners and entire campgrounds will be moved. The plan also calls for converting a 3.2- mile section of Northside Drive, a popular road through the valley floor, into a bike and foot trail. Now, the draft plan enters its critical 90-day public-comment period, ending July 7. Mihalic said that after the comment period, the park service will make any necessary modifications to the document and release the final management plan at the end of the year. As a result of the 1997 floods, Congress already has set aside about $100 million for removal of existing roads, bridges, campsites and housing in the Merced River floodplain. Babbitt said the completed draft owes a lot of credit to that 1997 flood, when the Merced River broke from its banks and destroyed much of the development along the river. After the flooding, the park service and environmentalists for the first time in a generation began to cut the deals that would reduce development in the narrow river corridor by not rebuilding much of what was swept away. The plan contains five alternatives, ranging from the proposal preferred by the park managers to the possibility that the park does nothing at all. Under the preferred alternative, the valley would gain 121 acres of wetlands, gain more than 100 acres of restored Black Oak forest, and see a net decrease of 71 acres of developed land in the valley. For example, the parking lot at Yosemite Falls would be moved and replaced with a meadow and a small interpretive plaza. Praising the preferred alternative, Natural Resources Defense Council board member Christine Russell said: "You don't have to be a policy expert to see that this is great. Instead of noisy traffic, visitors will hear birds and waterfalls." Not every environmentalist was so moved. David Brower, one of the deans of the nation's conservation and environmental movement, said the proposal didn't go nearly far enough. Brower, who said he is old enough to have ridden the now-defunct rail line into the park, said managers should have worked harder to eliminate cars entirely from the Valley as originally sought in the 1980 plan. "Rail wasn't even considered in the this document," he said. Babbitt, who joined the Clinton administration eight years ago, early on made a Yosemite Valley management plan one of his top priorities. After eight years of taking hits from both the region's business community, which feared a reduction in sales if the park clamped down on visitation, and from adamant preservationists who worried that the park was being loved to death, Babbitt said the thick document is the result of years of hard-fought negotiations and constant court battles. But in the end, he joked, one factor may be most responsible for reaching a temporary truce: exhaustion. "The problem in Yosemite is that it has too many damn friends," Babbitt said, drawing laughter from the crowd at the speech sponsored by San Francisco's Commonwealth Club, a civic group.