Peace in the Valley : For an Anniversary Moment, Yosemite Strife Is Silenced

For a brief moment, all was quiet Monday in sun-drenched Sentinel Meadow. Nearby traffic was stopped. No one spoke. Only the screeching of birds, the clicking of cameras and the hum of a distant bus broke the stillness.

For the brief moment, there was a sense of what Yosemite Valley had been before man came here. The silence was a tribute to the park on its 100th anniversary, a moment called for by park officials at the culmination of a centennial year that was marked by feuding and fires in the famed preserve.

The birthday party in the meadow drew an estimated 2,500 visitors, who sat under a hot sun in metal folding chairs facing Yosemite Falls, reduced by the long summer to a tiny trickle over the granite walls. An actor portrayed conservationist John Muir in a brief monologue between speeches by Park Service and Interior Department officials.

Park Service representatives, who in the past year have been criticized by environmental activists for failing to reduce development in Yosemite Valley, alluded to the recent strife in their addresses. They sought understanding.

Yosemite has not been “immune from turmoil and controversy,” Yosemite National Park Service Supt. Michael V. Finley said from a low stage covered with red, white and blue bunting, “ . . . and I anticipate it will be subject to additional controversy as we sort out what many of you feel to be the proper management of this park.”

He paused and added: “You know I have found there are no wrong opinions related to Yosemite. There are just very, very different opinions.”

The crowd laughed.

For the past several months, environmental activists have been campaigning to remove more buildings and lodgings from Yosemite Valley, the heart of the park. Most of their fury has been directed at the Yosemite Park & Curry Co., an MCA Inc. subsidiary that runs the accommodations under a government contract. But the Park Service, which oversees the company, has not been spared in the attacks.

Indeed, the activists were on hand Monday to dish out more criticism.

“I would have preferred just to let the day pass,” said Joe Boland, 45, a preservationist who heads an informal group he calls Friends of Yosemite. “To me, at least, there is not that much to be proud of in the way this place has been handled in the last 100 years.”

Patricia Schifferle, 39, another environmental activist, was equally unmoved by the celebration. Like Boland, she believes Yosemite Valley is too congested and too commercial.

“We had passionless bureaucrats giving us platitudes about how they were going to do a better job,” she said of the officials who addressed the crowd.

But visitors, more removed from the haggling over park development, seemed to enjoy themselves.

Keith Sheaff, 62, a retired Navy chief from Maryland, professed himself moved by the ceremony, which included music from a military band.

“I always choke up when I hear ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ and see the flags,” he said.

National Park Service Director James M. Ridenour told the crowd that the Park Service must serve visitors as well as preserve nature. He pledged commitment to Yosemite’s 1980 General Management Plan, which calls for removing many buildings from Yosemite Valley and reducing traffic in the park.

In an effort to spur enactment of the plan, a group of environmentalists, former Park Service officials and businessmen are attempting to wrench the Yosemite concession from MCA when its contract expires in 1993.

But Curry Co. officials defend their record, saying they have not added more buildings to the park and have introduced environmentally sensitive programs, including recycling and a ban by company stores on some products that are harmful to the environment.

On top of the fight with conservationists, the Park Service this year had to contend with lightning-ignited fires that burned about 22,000 acres in August. The charred and twisted remnants of fallen trees are visible from some of the park’s roads.

But none of that seemed to matter to most of Monday’s celebrants.

A group of schoolchildren sang “Happy Birthday” to the park, visitors streamed into Yosemite Village for free birthday cake and during that brief moment of silence, gray-haired couples reminisced about romantic summers in Yosemite long ago and parents toting babies remembered their own childhood days in the park.