In the summer months, Yosemite National Park bursts at its seams. Its trails are lined with crowds. Visitors wait in long bus lines to get around Yosemite Valley. Cars get snarled in traffic jams.
Managing that universal love for the park has only become more challenging. The Trump administration has overseen significant staff losses at the Interior Department, leaving Yosemite occasionally understaffed and at times partially unmanned.
For those whose job it is to protect Yosemite today and keep it unimpaired for future generations, news that the Trump administration is working on a plan that would give a developer private access to the park, as first reported by NOTUS, was yet another blow.
“The union is incredibly concerned about the implications of this private development for the working conditions of an already overwhelmed staff, who will have to address the cultural, resource and visitor safety ramifications of this area,” said a spokesperson for the National Federation of Federal Employees local that represents hundreds of Yosemite employees.
Trending
Nevada-based developer Kingsbarn Realty Capital wants to build a road that would connect a currently undeveloped private property (known as Hazel Green Ranch) just outside the park with one of the main access roads inside Yosemite’s boundaries. For more than a year, the Trump administration has been pressuring National Park Service staff to find a way to enable the project, sources told NOTUS.
Currently, the Park Service is exploring how to arrange a land swap that would give Kingsbarn a quarter-mile strip of Yosemite’s land in return for land of equivalent value somewhere else in California.
Former park officials, the park’s staff union, national park advocates and many everyday Americans have all come out in opposition to the proposal. Not only are Yosemite’s boundaries sacred, they say, but the plan flies in the face of a longheld consensus: The park needs to address overcrowding, not exacerbate it.
“Yosemite Valley is a mile wide and seven miles long. It’s incredibly narrow. It’s a small piece of land essentially that so many people want to visit, and so the overcrowding really denigrates from the experience,” said Cicely Muldoon, who served as the superintendent of the park for five years and stepped down just after President Donald Trump took office in 2025.
“Picking Yosemite apart piece by piece with commercial development that does nothing for the preservation of the park, that does resource damage, that introduces more and more crowding — it just makes it more difficult to preserve the park and ultimately takes away from the visitor experience,” Muldoon said.
“National parks are supposed to be the highest level of protection that we as a nation put on our land,” she said.
Yosemite is fairly difficult to access both for visitors and the staff who work there. The boundaries of the park are surrounded almost entirely by national forest lands, so most visitors and workers have to stay and live fairly far from the main entrances.
The park has dealt with such severe crowd problems that in 2020, in response to COVID-19, and then in later years to continue handling the crowds, it introduced a timed-entry reservation system. The system was highly effective at improving the visitor experience and got overwhelmingly positive public feedback, Muldoon said.
But the region’s hotel and tourism industry strongly opposed the system, because it required greater planning from visitors to the many resorts and hotels, creating a new barrier for those wishing to capitalize financially on growing enthusiasm for the park.
The Trump administration ended the timed-entry system for the 2026 summer visitor season. Visits to the park are up nearly 10% this year compared to last year, according to preliminary monthly use data from the Park Service.
“Yosemite is already facing an overcrowding crisis due to years of runaway lodging overdevelopment outside of the park and the terrible decision to get rid of this year’s vehicle reservation system,” said Mark Rose, the Sierra Nevada senior program manager for the National Parks Conservation Association. “A massive commercial development that can only be accessed from inside the park’s gates will further exacerbate the chaos we’ve seen in Yosemite this year.”
The National Federation of Federal Employees pointed out that the development would give private residents or visitors better park access than what even some park employees have.
“Yosemite NPS employees, like other park units all around the country, have seen historically low morale due to inadequate housing, budget cuts and severe staffing issues,” the NFFE spokesperson said. “In housing specifically, employees struggle with housing availability, long commute times and high costs.”
Kingsbarn’s attorney, longtime lobbyist Lanny Davis, argued the land exchange will actually benefit the park because it is environmentally friendly. If Kingsbarn develops housing on Hazel Green Ranch and the Park Service doesn’t pursue the land exchange, visitors will need to drive an hour and a half to reach Yosemite Valley. If the land exchange goes through, a new road would cut that drive down to 30 minutes.
“This is environmentally sound, consistent with environmental values,” Davis said. “I am an environmentalist and a liberal Democrat, otherwise known as a progressive Democrat, and the way we’re doing it is to exchange land that we wish to use for environmental purposes for all of the pollution to be reduced from 11 miles from a 56-mile round trip.”
Davis once served as an adviser to Bill and Hillary Clinton, and he has represented a list of controversial clients including Michael Cohen, Harvey Weinstein and the former dictator of Equatorial Guinea. Kingsbarn Realty Capital is not listed as a client in his lobbying disclosures.
Kingsbarn, through a web of limited liability companies, purchased the 83-acre parcel outside the boundaries of the park in 2024 from California developer Lewis Geyser, who tried and failed for years to force the National Park Service to allow construction of the connecting road through the park. The Bush and Obama administrations refused to pursue a land exchange, and the developer eventually lost in both district court and on appeal when he sued to force the issue.
Davis emphasized that Kingsbarn is not seeking an easement, but rather a complete land exchange: “It’s a land exchange; it’s not a give-up by the Park Service or a right of way, or an easement.”
“The only way it can legally be done, is there is a provision under the law that allows the Park Service to exchange land of equal value, as long as there are no adverse environmental effects, which there are not. So this is a land exchange. We purchase land. We donate it to the Park Service,” Davis said. “We exchange the value of that land that we’re giving to Yosemite for the value of the land to build the road.”
Those arguments haven’t won over the national park’s advocates.
“There is no logical reason, except to gain access for proposed new highly profitable development, for the property owner to desire access from the undeveloped parcel to the main paved road in Yosemite Park,” said John Buckley, executive director for the Central Sierra Environmental Resource Center. “There are no residents of this property.”
“We’ve watched this same proposal get rejected by three prior administrations and by the courts, and we don’t believe the underlying facts on the ground have changed — only the political willingness to entertain it,” said Patrick Koepele, executive director of the Yosemite Rivers Alliance. “Ceding any part of Yosemite National Park to enable private road access sets a precedent this region cannot afford, regardless of how the land swap is structured or valued.”
Trump’s Interior Department appears unfazed: “Hyperbolic garbage,” Interior Department spokesperson Cody Sargent wrote on X of reporting on the plan.
“There has been no political pressure to reach a predetermined outcome, and claims suggesting the Department is secretly working to hand over National Park Service land to a private developer are false,” Sargent said.
“If a proposal advances, the Department will follow established procedures to ensure appropriate coordination, transparency and public involvement consistent with federal law.”
Author
