By Katy Grimes

Yosemite National Park is one of America’s greatest natural treasurers, set aside as a national park nearly 150 years ago by Abraham Lincoln specifically for “the public use, resort and recreation…for all time.”

Yet a proposal by the National Park Service, whose motto is “Experience Your America,” fundamentally changes the entire purpose for which Yosemite was set aside in the first place.

This week I interviewed Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Calif. He said the National Park Service has been pushing to radically alter the purpose, nature and use of Yosemite National Park in order to remove most visitors.

McClintock has been waging a battle against the National Park Service and what it has been doing behind closed doors, with the help of radical environmentalists.

A few months ago, McClintock discovered that the National Parks Service “opposes commercial activities” in the park, and has been working very quietly to get them removed. Bicyling, rafting, camping, snowshoeing and horseback riding were all put on the hit list. It also opposes the souvenir shops, snack stands and hybrid bus tours. These “commercial ventures” apparently offend environmental justice seekers and a new brand of enviro-park rangers who are hostile to park visitors, most of them taxpayers who pay the rangers’ salaries.

According to McClintock, the park service has already begun the process of removing human activity in Yosemite.

The Royal Forest

“Ninety-five percent of the park is already in wilderness,” McClintock explained. “Yet the overwhelming majority of park visitors come to that five percent where amenities are available for public recreation: where they can rent a bike; where they can stop at the snack shop to get ice-cream cones for the kids; where they can pick up souvenirs at the gift shop; where the family can cool off at a lodge swimming pool.  And it is precisely these pursuits that the National Park Service would destroy.”

For more than a century, the mission of helping the American people enjoy the grandeur of their national treasure was honored by the park’s stewards.  But no more.  The new plan would radically alter the visitor-friendly mission of the park with a new, elitist maxim: “Look, but don’t touch; visit, but don’t enjoy.”

The increasingly exclusionary and elitist policies of the National Parks Service and National Forest Service are part of the environmental justice movement. “These actions evince an ideologically driven hostility to the public’s enjoyment of the public’s land — and a clear intention to deny the public the responsible and sustainable use of that land,” McClintock said.

“During the despotic eras of Norman and Plantagenet England, the Crown declared one third of the land area of Southern England to be the Royal Forest, the exclusive preserve of the monarch, his forestry officials and his favored aristocrats,” McClintock explained. “The people of Britain were forbidden access to and enjoyment of these forests under harsh penalties.  This exclusionary system became so despised by the people that in 1215, five clauses of the Magna Carta were devoted to redress of grievances that are hauntingly similar to those that are now flooding my office.”

“The National Park Service proposal would remove long-standing tourist facilities from Yosemite Valley, including bicycle and raft rentals, snack facilities, gift shops, horseback riding, the ice-skating rink at Curry Village, the art center, the grocery store, swimming pools, and even the valley’s iconic and historic stone bridges,” McClintock told me. “These facilities date back generations and provide visitors with a wide range of amenities to enhance their stay at — and their enjoyment of — this world-renowned national park.”

The NPS seeks to use the Wild and Scenic River designation of the Merced River as an excuse to expel commercial enterprises and dramatically reduce the recreational amenities available to park visitors. Yet according to the author of the designation, former Rep. Tony Coehlo, D-Calif., this was never the intent of the designation.

The Park Service says the restrictions are necessary to comply with a recent settlement agreement, reached with the most radical and nihilistic fringe of the environmental Left, according to McClintock.  But McClintock said the settlement agreement was not mandatory and one in which the Park Service voluntarily entered, then paid $1 million to the environmentalists.

The enviro lawsuit

The changes are part of a new set of principles for the park known as the Merced River Plan. Released only in January, the 2,500-page document comes after years of lawsuits over what should be allowed in Yosemite Valley and the Merced River that flows through it, according to McClintock.

The Merced River Draft Plan public webinars and workshops were held in early 2013, but McClintock said they were essentially a farce.

McClintock said the plan calls for the removal of stone Sugar Pine bridge, built in 1928 and located behind the Ahwahnee Hotel, because its abutments “impede the flow of the Merced River and cause erosion.” It also recommends rebuilding only 40 percent of the 406 campsites lost in the 1997 flood, restoring 203 acres of meadows and improving parking. Visitors still would be allowed to bring bikes, horses or rafts to the park but rentals would not be available any longer.

In fact, that agreement imposes no requirement on the government to do anything more than adopt a plan consistent with current law, according to McClintock. “And current law is explicit: the 1864 act establishing the park guarantees its use for public recreation and resort; the 1916 Organic Act creating national parks explicitly declares their purpose to be the public enjoyment of the public lands, and the Wild and Scenic River Act contemplated no changes to the amenities at Yosemite — so says its author, [former] Democratic Congressman Tony Coelho. Yet the Park Service insists that the law compels these radical changes.”

Flood damage

In January of 1997, the Merced River flooded and caused significant damage to the park. The flood even left more than 2,000 park visitors stranded for several days, because the roads were damaged by the floodwaters.

Following the flood, Congress appropriated $17 million to restore the parking and campgrounds that were wiped out. “That money was spent, but the parking and campgrounds were never restored,” McClintock said. He has made several formal inquiries to the National Park Service asking where the money went. Only just this week he received a report from Yosemite officials. Once he has thoroughly reviewed the report, I will share his findings.

Following the flood and Yosemite’s failure to restore the camp sites or parking, McClintock said the number of annual visitors to the park dropped from 4 million to 3 million, a 25 percent drop. Revenues also dropped about 25 percent.

Protected toads and frogs

Further complicating matters, and providing additional evidence of the radical environmentalist agenda behind the Yosemite proposals, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s announced it was going to list the Sierra Nevada yellow-legged frog and the mountain yellow-legged frog as endangered species, and the Yosemite toad as a threatened species. And service was going to designate a critical habitat for these species.

“These listings and the associated critical habitat will impact over two million acres of private, state and federal land,” McClintock said. He noted this was exactly why the Fish and Wildlife Service took the action it did. “Critical habitat designations will likely cause severe restrictions on land access and could limit or forbid activities such as grazing, trout stocking, logging, mining, and recreational use, resulting in a devastating impact on the local economy.”

By Katy Grimes

Instead of criticizing the environmentalists who want the riff-raff out of Yosemite National Park, to be returned to its “wilderness state” so visitors can enjoy “tranquility and introspection,” the Sacramento Bee has taken up a fight with Rep. Tom McClintock.

McClintock is trying to bring some much needed attention to what the National Park Service has been doing behind closed doors, with the help of environmentalists.

Tom McClintock recently discovered that the National Parks Service opposes “commercial activities” in the park, and is working to get them removed. This includes bicyling, rafting, camping, snowshoeing, horseback riding, as well as the souvenir shops, snack stands, and hybrid bus tours. These “commercial ventures” apparently offend the enviros and park rangers.

The park service has already begun the process of removing human activity in Yosemite. But McClintock isn’t giving up without a fight.

Never mind that it is a national park. The 1864 land grant stated:

Granted the Yosemite Valley, and the Mariposa Big Tree Grove, to the State of California “upon the express conditions that the premises shall be held for public use, resort, and recreation [and] shall be inalienable for all time.” 

Yosemite Land Grant (1864) (Act of June 30, 1864, ch. 184, §§ 1, 2; 13 Stat. 325[1]). See 16 USC 48.[2]  Lands eventually would be receded to the Federal Government and added to Yosemite National Park in 1906 (see 34 Stat. 831)

I talked with McClintock after the Sacramento Bee published an editorial misrepresenting McClintock’s position on the Yosemite matter, and then refused to publish his responses.

McClintock provided me with these communications, and they demonstrate a serious bias against McClintock. This isn’t the first issue the Bee has attacked McClintock on — recently Bee columnist Dan Morain derided McClintock for voting against the federal ‘fiscal cliff’ deal. More recently, McClintock has done battle with Bee editors over the Natomas levee problems in Sacramento.

“Yosemite belongs to the American people, and the Park Service’s job is to welcome them and accommodate them when they visit their park – not restrict and harass them.”

But the Bee took that statement from McClintock and said, “McClintock is making Yosemite employees sound like Gestapo agents.”

“This should give every reader a clear insight into the extremism and unreality that dominates this newspaper’s editorial board,” McClintock said.

But apparently not content with McClintock’s response, Bee editor Stuart Leavenworth sent McClintock’s Communication Director Jennifer Cressy an email response:

Jennifer,

Last Thursday, I made a direct request to speak to Rep. McClintock regarding his position on various Yosemite issues. Rather than help facilitate that request, you continued to press me for specifics on my questions. I eventually gave up after it was clear that Rep. McClintock was not going to grant an interview.

Just so you and he know, we (and most media outlets) will never agree to submitting questions in writing in advance as a condition (or a substitute) for interviewing an elected official. In some countries, such as Russia, governments can enforce that requirement. If and when it ever happens in the United States, I fear for the future of our democracy.

In its April 14 editorial, the Bee said:

Worst of all, McClintock is going out of his way to disparage national parks employees, including those who have developed the Merced River plan, an attempt to reconcile recreation and conservation needs following the 1997 flood in Yosemite. While there are items to question in the plan – such as banning bike and raft rentals and removing the stone Sugar Pine bridge, built in 1928 – McClintock is making Yosemite employees sound like Gestapo agents. When talking to Mariposa supervisors on April 2, he lectured the Park Service, saying its job is to welcome and accommodate visitors, “not to restrict and harass them.”

We attempted to talk to McClintock – to ask him why he opposes the Mariposa visitors center and the park expansion, while going out of his way to disparage Yosemite employees, whom he will need to work with in his district.

He rebuffed our requests.

Cressy said after receiving the letter from Leavenworth, the Bee fell silent and then accused McClintock and his office in print of ‘rebuffing’ their questions.  And the attempt to excuse their conduct as resistance to Russian-style government censorship is frankly bizarre, Cressy said.

McClintock cartoon style

In the final jab at McClintock, Jack Ohman, cartoonist for the Sacramento Bee did this cartoon:

McClintock said his efforts are part of a larger bipartisan group tying to save Yosemite for the public. According to the Yosemite for Everyone website, a group of bipartisan Congressmen have sent a letter to the National Park Service requesting an extension to the Merced River Plan comment period, which closed on April 18th.

Yosemite for Everyone is a group of dedicated individuals and concerned citizens who have an intimate connection with Yosemite National Park, wants Yosemite preserved for visitor enjoyment. The group has several letters  from retired Democratic Congressman Tony Coelho to the Director of the National Park Service.

The constant attacks on McClintock by the Bee are unjustified and petty, especially when the newspaper is just wrong.