Give ‘Em Bouquets, Not Bricks : Yosemite: The Curry Co. deserves credit for its management of the valley. Now, if we can just get the cars out. . . .

The periodic assault on Yosemite guardians has gone on long enough. Gnats are being strained at concerning Yosemite management while we in California as a whole swallow camels--the spoiling of our waters offshore and on, the reckless destruction of our forests and the apparent preference for gridlock over clean air and acid-free rain. More camels will be identified on request.

For the past 72 years I have been visiting Yosemite. I worked there year-round from 1935 to 1938, was fired by the Yosemite Park and Curry Co. for not being a good enough publicity manager, helped draft the Sierra Club’s national park policy, was dubbed John Muir reincarnate by Stephen R. Fox in his book “John Muir and His Legacy: The American Conservation Movement,” and helped establish six additions to the national park system and keep dams out of three of them. I care a lot about national parks.

With all this behind me, I now wish the Curry Co. were receiving the bouquets it merits instead of the bricks it doesn’t deserve.

There were about 37,000 other visitors when I first visited Yosemite Valley in 1918. Twenty years later, when I stopped working there, the count almost hit half a million. Last year there were six times that many and the valley looked better and was more enjoyable than it had been half a century earlier. The impact of visitors upon the valley has been lessened and the impact of the valley upon the visitors has been enhanced.

That is the prize we need to keep our eye on. It needs to continue. The Curry Co. deserves much of the credit. Much of it has been the result of the company-run shuttle system that has allowed the Happy Isles and Mirror Lake regions, which were extensive parking lots, to be restored into something approaching their original beauty and serenity.

That doesn’t mean that you can escape people in those areas. If that is your goal in Yosemite, it is understandable. And there are plenty of places in Yosemite Valley where you can escape, although I won’t list them, lest the crowd beat you to them.

I enjoy watching people enjoy Yosemite, looking at their faces, the wonder in them, the variety of their ages and origins. They are having their chance to know one of the world’s most beautiful places, at all hours and in all seasons. Their very numbers, through the years, have provided the political force to keep most of Yosemite National Park one of the best-preserved places on Earth.

In the valley itself, keep an eye on how the natural scenery has been little affected by the facilities built to serve the visiting lovers of Yosemite and the lovers of Yosemite who serve them.

What we need to worry most about in Yosemite is the auto. Let the National Park Service’s bold General Management Plan count on an early departure. The Century of Oil brought the cars. Sooner or later in the next century the cars will be starved of fuel and the people will have the valley back.

Let’s hurry that day by restoring the Yosemite Valley Rail Road (that’s the way they spelled it before the great flood of Dec. 11, 1937, took it apart). It was a great ride, worry-free, up the beautiful Merced River Canyon. And remember that railroads helped establish the national parks in the first place. Restored railroads can help protect them for people--and from cars.

Visit the valley in an off-season, when cars are few, and see for yourself how worthwhile an investment the restoration of the railroad would be when it gives us a chance to tie private automobiles outside.

While we’re at it, let’s restore the Hetch Hetchy Valley, keep it free of private cars, and let it share Yosemite admirers. If Los Angeles can find ways to get by with less hydroelectric power from Mono Lake’s streams, San Francisco can certainly get by with less power from the Tuolumne River. Unlike Los Angeles, San Francisco will get more water in the bargain! Water will no longer evaporate from a reservoir-free Hetch Hetchy. There is plenty of storage space in Don Pedro reservoir, down at the 800-foot level on the Tuolumne River, where water is diverted to San Francisco.

What should we do with the O’Shaughnessy Dam? The Army Corps of Engineers should enjoy the task of dismantling it. With the Berlin Wall as a precedent, pieces of the Hetch Hetchy dam could be sold to tourists as mementos. Invest the revenue in the Yosemite railroad.

To sum up: Let the Yosemite master plan phase private automobiles out and phase rail and more shuttle service in. A few further accommodations, as superbly planned as those at Yosemite Lodge, can be fitted in nearby. If a few corporations convene there in the off-season, it could be good for slipping a little ecological conscience into the corporate soul. Let the people who serve visitors live where they work, not a multimile commute away. Let Yosemite’s beauty remain part of their reward. Be grateful for the company that manages the wonderful shuttle system, that has driven Styrofoam out of the valley, that has long been recycling beverage containers and is now recycling chlorofluorocarbons while keeping prices lower than you will find in equivalent tourist meccas in San Francisco or Los Angeles. It is a company run by people who care about Yosemite and stay there long enough to learn how to protect it well. It is a company I own no stock in. Remember, they fired me.

Generous credit is deserved by the Yosemite people, government and company, who have been masters of restoration. Try, for example, to find traces of the Old Village, the Sentinel Hotel, Cedar Cottage, the Ahwahnee golf course, the highway across the Ahwahnee Meadow, the Big Oak Flat Road, the old Wawona Road or the overjammed campgrounds of the past. Yosemite people deserve to toast, not a roast.

If they annually serve 3 million visitors so well and protect the park so well that the company makes a lot of money, don’t curse them. Profit is still legal. Persuade them to invest some of it in more shuttles, a railroad, developing smogless fuel for campers and distributing souvenir fragments of Hetch Hetchy’s evil dam. If there is too much profit after all that, renegotiate!

Anyone for a cease-fire while we stop straining at gnats and swallowing camels and get about the task of restoring precious bits of California?