For more than a year, the National Park Service has been quietly working to fulfill an unprecedented directive from Trump officials: Parcel off a corner of Yosemite National Park to give to a private developer.
National Park Service staff in California and Washington, D.C., are trying to arrange a land exchange between a Nevada-based company and the federal government, according to four people directly familiar with discussions, as well as agency documents reviewed by NOTUS.
Since the spring of 2025, the Trump administration has been looking into ways it could cede a roughly quarter-mile strip of land inside Yosemite to a company that, through a web of limited-liability companies, is operated by real-estate developer and investment firm Kingsbarn Realty Capital. Officials are proposing the Park Service give up the land or “interest” in the land in the form of an easement, and in return receive land of equal value somewhere in California that has yet to be decided.
The private developers own an 83-acre plot of land just outside the western boundaries of Yosemite, about five miles from one of the park’s defining ancient sequoia groves. Jeff Pori, the CEO of Kingsbarn, wants to build a short road connecting the property to one of Yosemite’s central thoroughfares. The new road would give the land exceptionally rare private access to a park that is otherwise almost entirely buffered by national forests.
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The property’s current access road is more than 10 miles from an entrance to the park, and much further from Yosemite’s most iconic sights. Without a new road, visitors to the property — whether it be developed into a hotel, resort or private residence — would need to drive an hour and a half in a circuitous route to reach the popular Yosemite Valley.
The planning process has created a tense environment inside the National Park Service for the people involved; Kingsbarn’s proposal is backed by the full weight of the Interior Department’s top political leadership, sources said.
“They want us to be responsive to the property owner and their lobbyists or people, and they want us to work with these folks,” said one person familiar with the conversations.
“The political pressure being brought to bear is very unusual,” said another person familiar with the conversations and the park’s history.
If the deal goes through, the Trump administration would be breaking with 150 years of American precedent at the birthplace of the national park system. The federal government has historically strived to expand the crown-jewel national parks, not give up land within them.
“The national park idea started in Yosemite with Abraham Lincoln’s preservation of Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias,” said Cicely Muldoon, a 40-year veteran of the Park Service who served as Yosemite’s superintendent for about five years. Muldoon retired from Yosemite shortly after President Donald Trump took office in 2025.
“Our basic purpose in the national parks is to preserve these places unimpaired for future generations, not letting go of that for the purpose of private profit,” she said.
Interior’s advocacy for the deal is a significant reversal of a pledge Secretary Doug Burgum made in his 2025 confirmation hearing: “The national parks, absolutely we need to support and protect every single inch of those,” he said.
It also contravenes the presidential message Trump shared on Aug. 24 of this year, to announce the beginning of National Park Week: “My Administration is committed to protecting every acre of our lands and preserving the cleanest air and water in the world.”
And it goes against the agency’s past position on this specific piece of land. The Park Service has received this privatization request before, and it has rejected it repeatedly for over two decades.
In a statement to NOTUS, a spokesperson for the National Park Service said “no final decisions have been made,” but that any land exchange or access proposals “would be subject to all applicable federal laws, regulations, and Departmental policies, including required environmental review and public notification processes.”
“If a proposal advances, the Department would follow established procedures to ensure appropriate coordination, transparency, and public involvement, consistent with federal law,” the spokesperson said.
Kingsbarn did not respond to a request for comment.
A limited-liability company controlled by Kingsbarn purchased the undeveloped land outside Yosemite for $4 million in 2024, calling the property “Sanctuary at Yosemite” in records reviewed by NOTUS.
Historically the land was called Hazel Green Ranch. Its previous owner was a California developer named Lewis Geyser, who had tried for years to persuade the Bush administration, and then the Obama administration, to let him build a short private road in Yosemite. He planned to develop Hazel Green Ranch as a resort.
In the early 2000s, the Park Service appeared interested in the possibility of working with Geyser as part of a broader plan to dramatically reduce the development pressure on the Yosemite Valley. But that plan quickly collapsed, and the National Park Service in turn refused to allow any further development within the boundaries of Yosemite.
Geyser eventually sued in 2007 to try to force the issue, losing first in district court and again on appeal in 2012.
Both times, the judges ruled that Geyser did not have a claim to a private road. While the federal government has an obligation to provide an exit for private properties completely enclosed by federal lands, it doesn’t have to allow for new roads when one already exists. The land’s existing access road — albeit old, long and winding — runs through Forest Service lands.
When Kingsbarn took over the land from Geyser in 2024, Pori’s company almost immediately approached Interior about again trying to build the private road.
“We got an email from the new owner, reopening this issue that we felt was long closed,” Muldoon said. “Whoever bought the land hadn’t done their due diligence and realized that this was not a possibility by law, to build a new entrance essentially into Yosemite National Park for private purposes. So happily, when I left, it was still in that place.”
But whereas the Bush, Obama and Biden administrations said no, Trump’s Interior is pushing hard to say yes.
Every few weeks, at the direction of their political superiors, staff at the Park Service have scheduled meetings with Kingsbarn, multiple sources said. Pori sometimes attends the meetings with his associates, including Lanny Davis, a lobbyist who served as an adviser to Bill and Hillary Clinton and represented a list of controversial clients including Michael Cohen, Harvey Weinstein and the former dictator of Equatorial Guinea. Davis has not listed Kingsbarn or Pori as clients in his federal lobbying disclosures.
Staff are required to send regular updates on their progress to political appointees inside Burgum’s office, and they are occasionally berated by political staff for not moving fast enough, according to two people familiar with the process.
The current superintendent of Yosemite, Ray McPadden, has been pressured by people at the Interior Department and has tried to help move the land exchange along, according to two people familiar with his role.
Under the rules that govern public lands, any land that the Park Service chooses to surrender must be replaced by land of equivalent value.
While land exchanges are quite common for the federal government, they usually begin with an agency identifying a piece of land it wants to add to a park or forest. The Park Service trying to give a piece of a park to a private individual is an “unusual case,” said one former Park Service official, who added that the pursuit of this deal in secret makes it especially unprecedented.
For the exchange to happen, NPS has to appraise the land inside the park and identify land it wants somewhere else in California of equivalent value. The developer would then need to acquire the property and give it to the Park Service in the exchange.
The appraisal of the land within Yosemite is currently ongoing and is a difficult and lengthy task, sources said. How to value a piece of Yosemite is a hard question to answer — and likely cannot account for how the land is eventually developed, however lucrative that may be.
“Obviously this looks kind of unseemly, with the value of this property potentially exploding with the deal,” said one person familiar with the agency’s conversations. “They may give them acreage somewhere else to add to a national park unit that is ostensibly of equal value, but to the developer the value of the ultimate Hazel Green deal is incredible.”
“It kind of smells, you know. It’s not quite right,” they added.
Pori has had public business ties to people in Trump’s orbit.
In April 2025, Kingsbarn Realty Capital closed a deal to acquire the Los Angeles headquarters of Kim Kardashian’s lingerie company Skims, working with two companies with links to the Trump administration: the Newmark Group and Hankey Capital. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick chaired the Newmark Group before entering the Trump administration, and did not fully divest from the company until May 2025. Don Hankey, the chair of Hankey Capital, is also the chair of an insurance company that underwrote Trump’s $175 million bond in his appeal in 2024 of a New York civil fraud judgment.
Pori personally thanked both companies in the press release announcing the deal, which he said was made possible in part by Hankey Capital.
Between 2024 and 2025, Pori made monthly, largely small-dollar donations to the Republican Party committee, Trump’s campaign committee and associated PACs. Pori does not have a history of donating to national political campaign efforts before October 2024, according to a NOTUS analysis of the Federal Election Commission donor database.
Neither Pori nor the Interior Department have publicly expressed interest in the Yosemite land exchange.
Early this year, members of Congress were notified for the first time that the Park Service was considering the land exchange in Yosemite. The notification was vague. It implied that the Land and Water Conservation Fund would be used to enable the exchange but gave no details about the valuation of the land in Yosemite or what the Park Service might accept in return. It did not name the developer or indicate that the exchange was a high priority.
Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Jeff Merkley (D-Oregon), the chair and ranking member of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee with oversight of the Land and Water Conservation Fund, sent Interior a list of projects that they endorse for the fund; the proposal for Yosemite was not on the list.
“The Senate Interior-Environment Appropriations Subcommittee Chair and Ranking Member told the Interior Department which projects they agreed on to go forward. That didn’t include the Yosemite project, which Senator Merkley objected to,” said Justin Krakoff, the deputy communications director for Merkley.
Murkowski’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
California’s two Democratic senators told NOTUS they opposed the proposed exchange.
“The Land and Water Conservation Fund exists to acquire land and interests in land in order to safeguard natural areas, water resources, and cultural heritage — and to provide recreation opportunities for all Americans,” Sen. Alex Padilla said. “Projects should be chosen on merit, not on an applicant’s connections to high-ranking Trump Administration officials.”
“Yosemite is one of California’s natural wonders and must be protected from further development. The courts struck this project down once, but this administration appears hellbent on moving forward in the face of opposition from the public, Congress and the courts. But the only thing the administration cares about is whether there is money involved. We will fight this again,” said Sen. Adam Schiff.
The Park Service can likely move forward on a land exchange without any further congressional involvement.
If the land exchange eventually occurs as planned, it is likely that it will face a legal challenge from environmental and conservation groups.
The National Parks Conservation Association said it strongly opposes the plan.
“After a century of protecting Yosemite, the National Park Service is now working in overdrive to turn over land to a private developer in a secretive, backroom deal. This is an attack on the American people that own this national park. It would also be unlawful and a court previously rejected a road development proposal,” said Mark Rose, the group’s Sierra Nevada program manager.
He would not comment on the group’s legal strategy.
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