Refocusing the Debate Over Yosemite’s Future : Environment: On the national park’s 100th anniversary, automobiles and for-profit visitor services weren’t supposed to be in the valley. Angry environmentalists may have the wrong target.

Even when it seemed all Yellowstone was aflame in the summer of 1988, the debate over national-park fire policy never matched the rhetoric of environmental politics currently raging over the future of Yosemite National Park.

No surprise there. If the national parks are the crown jewels of America’s natural areas, Yosemite is the Hope Diamond. First nominated for preservation by Abraham Lincoln in 1864, Yosemite is the symbolic birthplace of environmentalism, the place where John Muir came in 1869 to extol granite monoliths and waterfalls. Muir later led the new Sierra Club in its futile fight to halt San Francisco’s damming of the Tuolumne River in its passage through Yosemite.

This of all years should be one of celebration: Yosemite’s 100th anniversary as a national park. But 1990 is also the year that environmentalists hoped to see the private auto banished from Yosemite Valley, along with most of the administration buildings, housing and profit-making visitor services in the one-by-seven mile canyon of the Merced River.

These actions were pledged in the National Park Service’s 1980 General Management Plan (GMP) designed to deurbanize Yosemite Valley. Only a few of the plan’s major proposals have been realized. More people than ever--3.4 million last year--visit Yosemite. Traffic clogs the valley on summer and holiday weekends. Valley veterans who look on Yosemite with a proprietorship akin to a family summer home are fuming.

Some of their wrath is falling on the park service, but even more of it is aimed at the Yosemite Park and Curry Co., a subsidiary of the MCA entertainment conglomerate since 1973 and the company that holds the master concessions contract for everything from hotels to bicycle rentals. The Sierra Club, Wilderness Society and others accuse the Curry Co. of thwarting implementation of the management, or master, plan and caring little about Yosemite except as a source of profits. The coalition is talking about forming a nonprofit operation that might wrest control of Yosemite concessions when the current 30-year contract expires in 1994.

The fight, brewing for some time, escalated when the park service issued a plan update, concluding that many of the 1980 goals--while worthy and official policy--were unattainable in 10-years’ time. The mood grew angrier when the park service disclosed the meagerness of its 1964-negotiated share of the Curry Co.’s income, less than 1% of gross.

To a degree, environmentalists have picked the wrong target. The park service is legally responsible for seeing the plan implemented. But a big profit-making corporation may be a more tempting bull’s-eye, even though the Curry Co. is a venerable valley institution, established in 1899 and considered one of the best concessionaires in the national parks. And the critics may be wary of accusing the park service of weak leadership--a valid criticism--just when a new Yosemite superintendent has arrived on the scene.

Michael V. Finley, in fact, is likely to transform the debate’s chemistry. A veteran of park squabbles from Alaska to Florida, he is viewed by those who know him as one of the few park-service pros up to this fight. A self-professed preservationist and wilderness lover, Finley, 42, is also a realist who seems to have the political savvy, negotiating skill and toughness to bring warring parties together.

Finley is starting deliberately. In interviews, he emphasizes the difficulty of getting money from Washington to pay for the costly master plan proposals, such as the creation of a new administration and housing village at El Portal, 15 miles west of the valley.

When he was in charge of regional park operations in Alaska, Finley recalls, he had a single ranger for every 2.5 million acres:

“I remember working with one ranger in Wrangell-St. Elias (National Park), with a teen-age daughter, who had to break ice to get (household) water out of a creek. And the superintendent down here is saying to the director of the park service, ‘Mr. Director, I need some money because I need to tear down a perfectly functional building in Yosemite Valley so I can build another perfectly functional building in El Portal because Yosemite’s crowded.’ ”

Finley is attempting to refocus the debate on long-term improvement of natural resources and the experience of the visitor. To learn about that experience, Finley likes to wander the valley in mufti and chat with visitors, often multiple generations of families.

“They all have different values. But I never talked to one who didn’t just love to be here. It was enough for many of them to walk up to the falls, to sit out and just watch the sun go across the rock, to watch other people and have a great time.

“The toughest job I think we have is fairly allocating that park experience. There’s no magic formula. There’s a (GMP) formula right now based on cars. That’s pretty imperfect. The science of carrying capacity is pretty imperfect, too. If you’re not careful, you can cater to one class of values. The GMP addresses all classes of values.”

The criticism of the Curry Co., Finley maintains, has often been unfair. Mere mention of the company or its parent firm makes some “eyes go red and minds go shut.” Some purists want more trails for bicycling, he noted, but declaim rafting on the Merced River “unholy,” though both activities are healthy pursuits that get visitors out where they can sense and enjoy Yosemite. “The rafting only became bad after the concessioner started running rafts.”

In implementing the master plan, the park service has sometimes become the victim of self-defeating actions. For example, hundreds of parking places were eliminated in congested portions of the valley but no transportation system to get visitors out of their cars--and the cars out of the valley--was substituted. Result: a lot of vehicle traffic in search of a parking place. Environmental groups oppose restoring any spaces, even as an interim measure, although Finley argues that would reduce congestion.

Finley realizes that Washington cannot now afford the Yosemite park-and-ride system envisioned in the master plan, but he thinks about where much of the problem starts--beyond the Yosemite borders. “One of my goals is that in all the state (mass-transit) planning we say, ‘Hey, don’t forget Fresno and Merced (two Yosemite gateways).’ In the back of my mind, some day there will be a light-rail line coming up Highway 140 right into the valley.” Years ago, the Yosemite Valley Rail Road carried visitors from Merced to El Portal; there have been proposals to reinstate the line.

The proliferation of cars and concessions no doubt traumatizes those who talk of returning the valley to the days of John Muir and Ansel Adams. That is not only impossible, it is not necessarily desirable. Yes, Yosemite is more cluttered and less park-like than it should be, but the car has allowed millions of Americans to come to gaze in awe at Yosemite’s natural wonders. And most of the fuss centers on just a couple square miles of valley floor. On virtually any day, it is still possible to find solitude after a 10-minute walk from the road. Outside the valley, 94% of the 1,200-square mile park is wilderness--no motorized vehicles allowed.

Galen Rowell, a world-roaming climber and author-photographer, still finds Yosemite a magical place. “After 35 mountain expeditions to regions such as the Himalaya, Patagonia and Siberia, I have found nothing like Yosemite,” he wrote recently. “There is no other place where so many virtues of beauty, fine weather, biological diversity and wilderness come together to form such a complete mountain paradise.”

Rowell might also have mentioned good old-fashioned political debate resulting from competing forces struggling over the proper balance between today’s visitor demands and the mandate to preserve Yosemite for all future generations. For all the rhetorical fury, however, the rock walls and cliffs and domes remain as Muir saw them: “Thousands of years they have stood in the sky exposed to rain, snow, frost, earthquake and avalanche, yet they still wear the bloom of youth.”