Report on Yosemite Valley today

[Sirius Glass]

CBC, National Post, BBC all covered it.

So did ABC, CBS and NBC.

[Peter Collins]

From direct observation in a comparable park--Yellowstone--the cost of admission is dwarfed by the cost of all the gear and souvenirs purchased at Canyon Village. ...And I think the parks should be supported by the fees of users--that's how to deal with Congress and dreadful maintenance/improvement. As Vaughn notes, you can drop a lot of cash on many alternatives that no one thinks twice about...

Just sayin'

[Leszek Vogt]

Glad that I no longer have to pay to get into the park. I was in a news blackout (by choice) for a month....while in AK. Apparently I didn't miss much. Suicidal people will continue (however this is explained)....

Les

[Drew Wiley]

Peter - just a handful of extremely popular parks like Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, and Yosemite subsidize much of the whole Park system. Nearly all the tourist trap riff-raff, trinket stands, and food service in Parks is money pocketed by private enterprise, not by the Park itself. They do pay leases and maybe some other misc fees; but overall, the incestuous relation between certain Parks and giant concessionaires like the Curry Co and Harvey has been very controversial over the years - they exert way too much influence of Park policy at times. But in terms of "just sayin", I'm one of those who has paid taxes my whole life, so feel that getting into the Park system for free isn't exactly a crime. Generating revenue mainly by entrance fees is and open invitation to crowding within Parks anyway. Here in Calif we have more Natl Parks than any other state, and some of them don't charge a dime to get in.

[Vaughn]

Harvey?!! Whoa! That goes back a long time! I worked for the Fred Harvey Company in 1977 at the Grand Canyon (South Rim...pumping gas)...but it had been bought out by another company by then. We (the employees of Fred) had a saying...Fred never died, someone dropped a quarter into the Canyon and he is still down there looking for it. Fred also ran the Death Valley concessions at the time and some employees worked there for the winter and Grand Canyon in the summer.

But the company had a small rec program for the employees, including a kiln for ceramics -- but more importantly (to me) a darkroom where I made my first prints (I had the 120 film developed for me at the camera shop in Flagstaff.) So the upside of the concessionaires is that young people have opportunities to work in a National Park (sometimes as one's first job) and have the opportunity to really get to know the Place. Granted some long-time employees are just a step or two above carnies. These days they are hiring a lot of over-seas kids.

I am also represented by the Ansel Adams Gallery in Yosemite Valley...so I have some bias about some of the Park's concessionaires...LOL!

If I had to pay every time I entered Redwood National Park, I'd be a poorer man! The associated State park did not use to collect an entrance fee for the Fern Canyon area, but do now...but not for the rest of the park. Don't mind paying since on a per-visit basis to the park, it is dimes a visit.

[Drew Wiley]

It was the self-interest or basically greed of the great early RR lines that spawned much of the NP movement to begin with, along with those classic old hotels.
Yosemite was a bit different in that it was allegedly protected as a state park, then highly abused by commercial interests once again. John Muir came there to
cut down trees to supply the sawmill for the most notorious hotelier/developer. Irony. I grew up during that post-War boom when everyone was car-camping in the Parks and watched bears being fed garbage from grandstands, etc. AA was fostered by a commercial interest not totally admirable, but like Muir, fell in love with the mtns and then become highly instrumental in the formation of Kings Canyon NP through his photography. Then the wilderness movement starting redefining a lot of things. I think Ken Burns did a superb job in tracing the evolution of thinking in his NP documentary series. As far as annoyances like bat-suit jumpers are concerned, I don't think their numbers are going to multiply out of hand anytime soon. Kinda a self-limiting sport in terms of realistic duration of career.

[John Kasaian]

FYI forest fire near HWY 41 and Sky Ranch RD North of Oakhurst, South of Fish Camp and above Bass Lake, and a second fire near North Fork. If you're headed N on 41 to Yosemite check road conditions for possible delays(I prefer listening to local news radio, I've been burned too many times by Caltrans)

[Drew Wiley]

Well, that area has only burned about twenty times in my lifetime. My first year in high school half the students were homeless due to the massive fires that leveled Ahwanee and Nipinawasee, and damned near most of Oakhurst too. Hope that pretty Nelder Cr area doesn't get hit this round. Is "Bass" still a Lake at all?
Wish Trump's hideous casino in Coarsegold would burn down, but it's below the brush zone. Maybe they'll get a kitchen fire someday from all the tri-tips, which
allegedly are tasty - about all the locals go in there for.

[John Kasaian]

The casino is closed. Locals think it will never reopen until the both sides come to an agreement (and all the $$ is returned)
I didn't know Trump had a dog in that fight.
He sure spoiled the ambiance on Lewer's St. in Honolulu with his "urban renewal."

[Drew Wiley]

It never was on Indian land, so was legally ambiguous to begin with. That's a tiny tiny rancheria. So Trump deliberately gave it too big a footprint (including parking), that it had to be on his own private property adjacent, and required the Chukchansi to lease the thing from him, at obviously little net profit to them. I knew something was fishy back when somebody was buying up all the land around it. But he's lost money on most of these gigs. Can't compete with the big Casinos like Table Mtn. I don't know how many Chukchansi are still left. But at least they're not a totally fictitious band like some. One of the very few potentially remaining ones I went to school with, and I'd sometimes run into him in the high country when he was leading pack trains for the Cunningham outfit. Little tiny guy on a huge horse. His cowboy hat was almost bigger than he was. I ran cross-country with him, along with a couple of guys now technically classified as part of the North Fork tribe, both of whom are doing well. One of them got his phD and has since opened a little day school up there to try to keep
the dialect alive, as well as get down in writing some of last of the native lore. Every little village up there had a slightly differing dialect, or radically different if
you compare Paiute-extracted Monache bands to either Central Valley Yokuts or the Miwok around Yosemite. The Monache were aggressive and virtually wiped
out some of the earlier foothills Yokuts. It's very difficult to say when they migrated over the top. I'm think it might have been given a boost back when the
southwest was hit by prolonged droughts in the 1200's or whatever. Hard to say what was happening in the Great Basin per se. But apart from Mono Lk, food was always a lot more abundant on the western slope of the Sierra, including tons of salmon, lots of acorns. Then sometime relatively late, probably in the 1700's, there seems to have been a huge population explosion among the Monache, only a century or so before anglo contact. The Spanish never messed with
them - they learned that lesson the hard way. There was a tiny Spanish outpost in the lower foothills. But I'll never publicly post its exact location.