Developments at Yosemite Park

A dispute over a $10-million employee housing project in Yosemite Valley has led to a full review of Yosemite National Park’s general management plan. The National Park Service deserves commendation for the decision. The review will not provide instant relief from the urbanization that clutters Yosemite Valley. But the timely decision should prompt the Park Service, and perhaps the Congress, to pursue further implementation of the plan with some sense of urgency.

About 3 million people visit the 761,000-acre Sierra park each year. Sometimes it seems that all of them are trying to jam themselves and their autos into beleaguered Yosemite Valley at the same time. Horror stories abound about the traffic jams, overdevelopment, crime and other woes of the 1-by-6-mile valley rimmed by rock formations looming 4,000 feet above the valley floor. But such stories have focused on the busiest holiday weekends. Visitors determined to find peace and solitude can do so by wandering a quarter mile or so from popular trails. Better yet, they visit the valley before Memorial Day or after Labor Day.

During the 1970s, the Park Service launched an extraordinary master-planning effort with the goal of eliminating as much development as possible from the valley to make visiting there a more natural experience. The personal auto ultimately would be removed from the valley. But implementation of the plan has been slow.

Too often the view has been that the Park Service was caught between those environmentalists who wanted all development out of the valley and the Yosemite Park and Curry Co., the park concessionaire, which demanded that all money-making facilities remain intact. This is an overly simplistic picture of the Yosemite dilemma. The fact is that most visitors, many of them from other countries, demand the convenience of lodging, restaurants, the grocery store, post office and photo shop. The Curry Co., a subsidiary of the MCA entertainment giant, is in the business to make money. But the Curry Co. has been more willing to meet environmental demands than concessionaires in many other parks. And everyone knows the difficulty involved in getting people out of their autos.

The Park Service contends that tight budgets have prevented the agency from making the investments necessary to remove more development and autos from the valley floor. Progress has been made toward master plan goals, but it has been incremental and not very visible to those visitors who do not know how much worse conditions were in the past. The work includes the conversion of valley roads to one-way traffic, the closure of some roads, removal of buildings and the dismantling of an old sewage treatment plant. The Ahwahnee golf course has been turned back into meadow.

The event that prompted the new review was a Curry Co. proposal to build dormitories for 452 employees near Yosemite Lodge, replacing dilapidated, unsafe structures and tent cabins. Some conservation organizations protested the project, contending there should be no new building in the valley at all. To be consistent with the master plan, employee housing must be relocated 15 miles away at the park outskirts at El Portal, they said.

Curry Co. officials argue that the master plan never envisioned banning all employee housing from the valley. They have a point when they contend that employees commuting on narrow, winding state Route 140 would aggravate congestion and create more smog. But it would not do so if there was regular, non-polluting transit service.

The environmental impact study and master plan review should include a rigorous reassessment of the need for services, administrative facilities and long-term employee housing in the valley. It should explore new ideas for reducing extraneous clutter and traffic. The result should be a renewed commitment to the master plan goals for a valley that may not be quite as convenient to visit, but one that will provide a far more memorable experience.