David Mihalic

This is a year of decision for Yosemite as the National Park Service completes a plan to guide future development in its rockbound valley, one of the world’s natural wonders. The planning process has been more than 20 years in the making, emerging in fits and starts from a lengthy study in the late 1970s and an ambitious general-management plan adopted in 1980 but never fully implemented. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt is determined to bring the planning process to a conclusion before leaving office early next year.

To do this, Babbitt selected Park Service veteran David A. Mihalic, 53, to be superintendent of Yosemite National Park. Babbitt took the unusual step of personally introducing Mihalic to the public last October, while making clear his frustration with earlier attempts to conclude the process. Mihalic was introduced as the person who could finally get the job done.

The goal has been to disperse some of the tourist development jammed into the eastern neck of the one-by-seven-mile valley and reduce the crush of autos. A scaled-down voluntary plan has already been adopted, which has visitors parking at three outlying areas and then taking buses into the valley for the day. Even this small step faced opposition from two of the region’s five counties, which feared the busing plan was a prelude to a ban on cars in the park.

Mihalic is one-quarter Oglala Sioux, and the Park Service calls him the highest-ranking Indian in the agency. His family includes Billy Mills, the runner who won a gold medal in the 10,000-meter race at the 1964 Olympics, and two former officials in the Department of the Interior. But Mihalic says his heritage has played no role in his career or his approach to the job. “I don’t look like an Indian. That is very hard to do with blue eyes and no hair,” he says with a grin.

After serving in the Army engineers from 1968-72, Mihalic worked for the Bureau of Land Management in Alaska and Denver, Colo. He joined the Park Service as a ranger in Yellowstone and was then named the first superintendent of Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve in Alaska. He subsequently served at Great Smoky Mountains, Mammoth Cave and as chief of policy in Washington. Since 1994, Mihalic has been superintendent of Glacier National Park in Montana.

Mihalic is married to the former Jeri L. Andrews, also a career National Park Service professional. They have two children, Emily, 10, and Nicholas, 8. He discussed his new mission in his somewhat cramped, rustic office at park headquarters.

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Question: The Yosemite planning process has been going on since the late 1970s. How will you get a new valley plan in effect by the end of this year?

Answer: Well, we haven’t been able to do it up to now. It’s actually easier to do it this way, to make it into a crisis. You know, one of the best things the Park Service does is rise to a crisis. If somebody falls off this rock around here, we can do a bang-up job of rising to the crisis. If there’s a flood, we can do a bang-up job. If there’s a fire, we can do a bang-up job. These emergency kinds of things are what we do best.

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Q: What is it that is so special about Yosemite Valley and therefore such a problem?

A: It is a magnet. The valley was the core. It was the Old Faithful of Yellowstone, the Crater Lake of Crater Lake. As a result, over 100 years ago, as this place became more well-known, the development was concentrated in the valley. The park was so isolated, and it’s still relatively isolated, it took some time to get here. People would come, they’d stay a week. All the stuff inside the valley--the campgrounds, the overnight accommodations--people came and stayed a week. I’m told that in the ‘50s and ‘60s, about 80% of the folks who came to the park stayed at least one night. The average was around three nights. About 20% came for the day. Now that’s reversed: 80% come for the day.

That’s one of the reasons we’re confronted with an infrastructure that was set up and developed and designed over time to serve visitors who spent the night here.

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Q: Doesn’t that reduce the demand or need for lodging in the valley?

A: It certainly reduces the need. It may not reduce the demand. The fact is, if you have less supply, you’ll have more demand. So what you have to do is manage the demand. It would be horribly difficult to try to add overnight accommodations. But if there are people staying in gateway communities, they can come for the day. That’s the visitation pattern. That’s a good thing, because it’s dispersing the demand placed on the valley part of this great park. Because many times when people talk about Yosemite, they’re not talking about the park, they’re talking about the valley.

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Q: The law that established the Park Service in 1916 set the goal of preserving the resource while also making it available to the people . . .

A: . . . “to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects” therein by such means and such manner as have been used today but to conserve them for future generations.

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Q: The valley is seven miles long and only a mile wide. How many visitors can you accommodate without affecting the resource? Is that the crux of the planning process? The number of visitors has doubled since 1980.

A: In my mind, it’s not [so much] the numbers of people as the management of them. Carrying-capacity studies work great when you’re talking about sheep and pasture. But this certainly isn’t pasture, and people aren’t sheep. It’s not so much what they tolerate--like white rats in a maze experiment--but what they prefer. So we’re trying to get to the point where we could manage the experience, and the quality of the experience, and help people choose the right thing.

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Q: Some argue that a more natural experience, meaning less development, is the better experience.

A: That’s saying you’ve got to enjoy the world the way I enjoy it. I’ve got black coffee. I don’t begrudge you the fact that your coffee has something else in it. There’s nothing in that 1916 law that said only if you suffer can you really have the the experience. . . . There’s nothing that says these places have to be the way that one class of people sees them.

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Q: Your job is to reconcile differences among people to the greatest degree so you can accommodate all?

A: This is my life’s work, so maybe I feel a little bit more emotional about it. To me, one of the most special things about Yosemite National Park is the beauty of the place and how it inspired people. It was so important at the time it was set aside that one of our greatest presidents, Lincoln, took time when our country was trying to rip itself apart . . . to set aside Yosemite for the people. Just in its genesis the park is special.

I think this place is so special for so many reasons. It is more than than just a place, it is a sacred place. And what we do here, we have to do for the common good, not just for the most shrill or the loudest voice who thinks their way is the best way. Does it mean it’s a place where anybody can engage in any particular recreational pursuit just because it can be done here? I don’t think it is, because it’s not a recreation area. It’s the most special of our places. That’s why we’re not a land-management agency. We manage our nation’s heritage, our national patrimony, the things that define us as a people.

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Q: But you do have to manage future development in the park.

A: Sure. The 1916 act didn’t say set these places aside but don’t do anything with them. The 1980 general-management plan at least preserved it until today. Maybe we haven’t got it right yet. But at least it’s improved, and almost 50% of that general-management plan has already been implemented. We’re still working at the hard stuff, but this place is worth the effort.

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Q: Are the decisions left to you the toughest ones?

A: We will take public comment over the next couple months and come up, I think in the spring, with a final plan that may not satisfy everyone, but it’ll be the best plan for the common good, the public good. It’ll be the plan that best meets the challenges that we have before us.

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Q: You have a reputation for resolving disputes.

A: The basic thing is to listen, to understand what others are trying to say what the disagreements are and understand the problem, first of all. There may be segments that may not have their way, but at least we’ll hear it. Sometimes, people will have great ideas, but you can’t always execute them. We’ve got to take the stuff we can implement to get to where we need to go, as opposed to trying to take giant leaps and faltering and falling down. I think we’ll come out with a plan that will stand the test of time.

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Q: A transit system is still critical?

A: The flood of 1997 [which washed out roads and campgrounds] offered us an opportunity and also just increased the complexity of the challenge. It would have been wonderful if we could have just stopped the world, closed the park and then fixed it and opened it up again. But we didn’t have that luxury. We have people who want to visit while we’re doing it. There’s the short-term stuff we have to deal with while we’re crafting a long-term fix. The transit portion has to be more effective. We have to do a better job to move people around.

That does not mean that we have to force them into it. Folks in the gateway communities are just horribly fearful that we’re banning all automobiles. What if the visitors are just going in for the day? Well, they can come in and drive their car for the day, but maybe if they want to get a parking space they’re going to have to get here early. Maybe we can have some incentives that they would choose to park somewhere outlying and take the bus. What we’ve got to do is get out of the negative part of the transportation.

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Q: You can’t please everyone.

A: Everybody who feels that they have the right answer for this place--that actually makes me feel better because we have the luxury of having customers who are committed to what we do and who care very much. At least we know that people share our values, and it gives us a common point from which we can all begin. I’m not sure we can satisfy them all. It’s not a bad thing to have public controversy. It means the public cares and wants to have a say, and I think that’s a good thing. The idea is that you have this spectacular place that can inspire so many. There are people who came here for a summer and stayed their whole lives. There are people here who have learned an ethic, whether it’s the environment or wilderness, and they’ve taken it with them. They’ve applied it elsewhere.

If that meant having a campground here, or a lodge or even an Awhahnee Hotel [which opened in 1927], and that’s the hook to get somebody in here and let them park on some pavement so that they get the value of this natural splendor, and they take it back to their home in an enlightened way, then it doesn’t matter whether we’ve paved over a couple of extra parking places in this valley. What we’ve done is made an investment in terms of values to instill in people that those people can take with them.

If people come here and leave the better for it, then that’s our challenge. But if they come here and have a bad experience, a congested experience, and they only think it was a bad recreation experience, then we’ve failed those people.

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Q: Do you have a favorite part of the park?

A: I haven’t gotten to see enough of it to know what’s a favorite yet. There are so many special places in this park that I think one key thing we need to do is make people understand that, as special as the valley is, there are other special places, too. I walked up the day after the secretary was here--on my way to catch a plane back to Glacier, I had a couple of extra hours. I stopped at the south entrance, at Wawona, and went through the grove of big trees. That is a special place for all the folks who rush by the south entrance to get to the valley. They’re going by some pretty spectacular things.