New Hope for a Better Yosemite

Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt recently took the unusual step of personally selecting the new superintendent of Yosemite National Park. David Mihalic, 53, a Cherokee Indian and current superintendent of Glacier National Park in Montana, will succeed Stanley T. Albright at Yosemite.

Babbitt’s decision was appropriate and timely. Traffic and crowding in Yosemite Valley have been among the National Park Service’s worst headaches for more than two decades. Efforts to implement a long-standing management plan to ease development and congestion have been plagued by indecision and controversy. The process has been complicated by parallel plans dealing with employee housing, commercial lodging and relocation of facilities following 1997 floods. A scheme to reduce auto traffic in the one-by-seven-mile valley by busing in visitors from gateway communities has fallen apart.

To his credit, Albright managed to wrest planning responsibility for Yosemite from the Park Service’s Denver center. Local park officials are in a better position to decide what is needed to serve both the public and the environment. To succeed, any plan must also be developed in consultation with environmental and user groups. To accelerate the work, Babbitt took the sensible step of consolidating the planning processes.

No Yosemite superintendent or plan can satisfy everyone, as Mihalic will soon discover. Still, with Babbitt firmly supporting him, Mihalic should be able to forge a plan that finally will achieve a goal that has eluded the Park Service for more than 25 years: greater protection for the valley’s natural resources, less traffic and fewer commercial facilities--and a richer park experience for all visitors.