Naturally, Yosemite Plan Splits Groups

Some worry the park will become a resort for the rich.

by Mark Grossi
Fresno Bee - May 3, 2004

Two days after a court order stopped chain saws in Yosemite National Park, television cameras arrived for a high-ranking Bush administration official on Earth Day. And a media tempest launched.

The headline: "Court stops Yosemite from cutting down some of the oldest trees in the park."

The brief story went out nationally, but it left out the biggest Yosemite Valley tidbit of the past 20 years: The court stopped the sweeping, $441 million renovation of buildings, roads and services, which had just lurched into high gear this year.

Yosemite employee Dave Warmus hops from one stump to another near Yosemite Lodge. The Lodge Project calls for a new road and logging of 720 trees, although an injunction has suspended work. Mark Crosse / The Fresno Bee

As for the pines and cedars, they were notancient at all, though they are a hot-button issue. Crews chopped them down to clear the way for a road in the rebuilding of Yosemite Lodge, a key project of the park's so-called Yosemite Valley Plan.

Why is this improvement plan such a big deal? A lot of people are interested, and not just environmentalists.

About 70% of Yosemite's 3.5 million annual visitors pass through the valley and see such glacially carved sights as Half Dome, El Capitan and Yosemite Falls. People from all over the world visit this 7-square-mile expanse 90 miles northeast of Fresno.

The valley is the object of passion, legal dispute and seemingly endless study, dating back to the 1800s. Last month, as those logged trees fell, history was being written and a different Yosemite Valley was rising.

Without that perspective, the logging headline did not tell enough of the story for visitors who just want clean bathrooms and directions to the nearest landmark. But the significance was not lost on those who have followed the valley for years.

"They shouldn't be cutting down trees unless the trees are diseased or some kind of a hazard to people," says Larry Molocznik, 75, of Santa Fe Springs, who visited the park last week. His wife, Marie, 76, adds: "We started coming here 50 years ago, and it was better back then. Less commercial. Now, it's like an upscale camping resort. It's just getting more exclusive."

Her comments strike the heart of a widespread feeling among opponents. They think the park service is trying to bring in more wealthy visitors and make more money.

Park service officials deny the charge, saying they are easing traffic flow, upgrading housing, moving employees out of the valley and preparing for inevitable visitor increases. At the same time, they promise to restore some of the nature lost here over the past century.

A tour tram drives through the Yosemite Lodge parking lot in full view of dozens of trees that have been logged. The Lodge Project, temporarily stopped, calls for a new road and logging of 720 trees. Mark Crosse / The Fresno Bee

In this tightrope act between people and nature, the trees logged near Yosemite Lodge last month are the latest of many flashpoints and lawsuits over the years.

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals stopped the work until the park service figures out how many people can visit the Merced River without trampling the plants, the banks and the surrounding ecosystem. No one is certain how long that will take, perhaps another year.The order also stopped six other valley projects concerning housing, utilities and other improvements -- anything with a connection to the river, the main stream in the valley. Yosemite officials say a court conference has been scheduled for June 1.

Flush with Funding

This isn't just another Yosemite lawsuit, however. Environmentalists have fought this one for years, appealing lower court rulings twice in the past 12 months. If they seem more intense, it could be because this isn't another plan long on promise and short on funding.

For most of the past 20 years, Yosemite hasn't had much money to build projects. Now, the park has millions.

Officials received $176 million in repair money after a 1997 flood. At almost the same time, the park entrance fees quadrupled from $5 to $20. Yosemite will keep about $130 million from the increase between 1997 and this year.

The park service already had hired some contractors for the more than $100 million on this major phase of the valley plan.

"The funding is completely off the charts compared to other national park units," says Greg Adair of Friends of Yosemite Valley, one of the lead groups in the lawsuit.

Besides the lodge and other building projects, park service officials say the money will pay for much-needed repairs and updating of an antiquated sewage system. They worry about legal delays leading to problems that might have otherwise been avoided.

"What happens if there is a sewage spill in the Merced River, as we've had in the past with this old system?" asks park spokesman Scott Gediman.

Environmentalists and others think it's worth a delay to stop a resort in the making. They say officials are planning more expensive motel accommodations, more amenities and fewer campsites near the river.

Critics also fear a transportation idea to increase busing into the park, saying buses carry a lot more people than cars. Visitors might overrun the valley, they say. That's why visitor limits and the current lawsuit are important to them.

One park service critic, Tuolumne County Supervisor Mark Thornton, says he has objected for years to busing from outside the park because no limits had been established for visitors.

"If annual visitation goes past 5 million people, it will cause economic and environmental harm ...," he writes in an e-mail. "Why? Because the rural lifestyles of the surrounding counties will be threatened by tourism development sprawl, and the additional millions of visitors will stress already taxed local government services."

Lodge Complaints

The Yosemite Lodge project, where the trees were felled, is another prime example of what disturbs objecting groups. George Whitmore, chairman of the Sierra Club's Yosemite Committee, says the road should remain north of the lodge, away from the river.

He suspects the park service wants to move the road so officials can expand the lodge in the future. In the plan, the park service will not replace more than 200 rooms lost in the 1997 flood, cutting back units by almost half.

Officials explain they plan to move Northside Drive south of the lodge, closer to the river, to eliminate an intersection in front of Yosemite Falls, where pedestrians and vehicles sometimes face big summer traffic jams. Officials would later close the current Northside route, turning it into a pedestrian promenade.

Whitmore doesn't like it: "Nature doesn't clear cut trees for parking lots and neat road corridors. They don't need to log an area near a river to make a road that shouldn't be moved in the first place."

Yet one expert who does not work for the park service suggests logging might not be a bad thing. Scientist Jan van Wagtendonk, who researches fire issues for the U.S. Geological Survey based at Yosemite, says the forest is not in a healthy condition.

"From what I've seen of the work, it looks more natural now after the logging than it did before," van Wagtendonk says.

The researcher says forests in the Sierra should have mosaic patterns of open places, as they have in centuries past. Forests get that mosaic from natural fires, which eliminate brush and smaller trees as well as stimulating some trees to drop seeds.

People started regularly dousing Sierra forest fires in the 19th and 20th centuries. As a result, many Sierra forests, including Yosemite Valley's, are unnaturally dense, which provides fuel for dangerous wild fires, van Wagtendonk says.

Now, managers set small, controlled fires to mimic nature. The logging near Yosemite Lodge may actually help conditions there, van Wagtendonk says.

Whitmore argues that nobody knows how dense the trees would have grown without human intervention.

"This idea of forests staying in some kind of balance forever -- I don't think the forests remain the same in perpetuity," he says. "That's why it is objectionable to cut down trees and interrupt the process again."

In the past 150 years, there has been a lot of interruption in that process. Past alterations have included farming, garbage dumps and sewage flushing straight into the river.

Now, though the park service is reducing the number of employees in the valley, the area is still a small city with a post office, jail, fire department, retail outlets and restaurants.

Nature continues, but it reflects the alterations that have changed the conditions.

For instance, the valley's meadows began drying out in 1879, when state land managers blasted through the valley's terminal moraine, a large rock and debris collection left as the last glacier receded thousands of years ago.

The debris had held some river water in the valley to keep meadows wet. Sometimes the moraine caused upstream flooding.

By blasting it and allowing a freer flow of water, land managers stopped the flooding.

As meadows dried out, pines and cedars started replacing black oak trees, naturalists say. The pines and cedars grew large quickly in the rich soil, making them seem older.

Last month, people noticed one logged ponderosa pine that was 5 feet in diameter, leading some to guess it was hundreds of years old. It was only about a century old.

The Way it Was?

Park historian Jim Snyder says nobody knows exactly what the valley looked like before the first photograph of it was taken in 1859.

"What is 'the way it was'?" asks Snyder. "You can restore fire in the valley, but you can't restore the climate of 1850. It's warmer now. In 1932, Yosemite Valley was in the running for the winter Olympics. But it would be tough to imagine that now."

One valley visitor, Carl Kuhl, 59, of Pleasant Hill, says he knows what he would do about restoration. Kuhl, a camper who has visited the valley annually for more than a half-century, says he would repair the flood damage and move on. No more improvements. No big changes.

"I've always been against this plan," he says. "Rebuild things the way they were. We don't need to move the road for traffic. It's only bad on five weekends a year."

Though restoration and improvements are a tricky business, Sierra historian Gene Rose says it's time to deal with these difficult questions.

"I've gotten terribly frustrated with the National Park Service," he says. "There's no closure yet. At some point, we all need closure."