How America Betrayed Yosemite

A recent piece for Dispatch

I recently published an investigation into the well-being of Yosemite National Park in Dispatch. Here is a little peek:

Yosemite, shot by me on expired Kodak Gold

Stuck in a snaking line of cars in 80-degree heat, tour buses idle behind minivans, but the scent of pine still cuts through the fumes. The websites warned of hours-long queues, but miraculously your car’s tires roll past Yosemite’s entrance gate in less than 25 minutes.

“Very quick for a summer Saturday,” a ranger jokes as he hands you a map. “You should have seen it last weekend.”

After a half-hour descent into the valley, you can finally get out. High above, the granite cliffs are so tall they don’t fit in your iPhone’s viewfinder. Among the network of tall pines, you’ve never been so small.

That’s Yosemite for you. Home to more than 400 species of animals, 1,500 species of plants, and roughly 4 million annual visitors, the park has stood, since President Lincoln first preserved it, as a radical idea: that some landscapes are too magnificent to belong to private individuals, and instead should be given to the nation.

Today, this legacy is at risk. Over the past six months, full-time staff at the National Park Service (NPS), the agency that governs the park, have been cut by 24% — the result of layoffs, buy-outs, and a hiring freeze from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Of the 8,000 seasonal positions allotted by President Trump’s budget, barely 4,500 were filled by July 9. The Center for American Progress estimates future cuts could reach a third of the NPS’s total budget. At the same time, the government has moved aggressively to open more public land to mining, logging, and energy extraction.

On a desperately hot July Saturday, I came to Yosemite to see how these pressures were reshaping the park. What I found was a patchwork of band-aids and resilient optimism: a small band of staff doing their best to hold things together as the crowds kept coming.

Park rangers are generally barred from speaking publicly about their work, but the few who did anonymously painted a bleak picture. One complained of a “horrible, horrible atmosphere” now rampant in the service. A second observed “a noticeable shift in the last couple of months” after veteran staff were pushed out. “The burnout is real,” a third concluded.

Earlier this year, frustrated rangers arduously climbed Yosemite’s most famous granite cliff, El Capitan — and hung an American flag upside-down.

---

Doug Burgum, the Trump-appointed Secretary of the Interior who oversees the National Park Service, is a man on a mission. While many rangers voice concerns about their parks’ upkeep, Burgum is focused on their cultural heritage. In April, he issued a directive requiring all 433 NPS-managed sites to post signs encouraging visitors to report any park information that tells a “negative story about the site or its history”, such as an acknowledgement of racism or indigenous struggle.

The impact has already been felt. At Muir Woods, another NPS-managed site in northern California, signage explaining the park’s redwoods conservation history — and the role played by Native Americans — was recently taken down.

Back in Yosemite, there are more tangible signs of decline. As a result of its low staffing levels, artefacts relating to the park’s natural history were stolen, ironically forcing every building in its Pioneer History Center to temporarily close. Out on the trail, tourists may grumble about the four-hour queues at the park’s southern entrances, but few notice the creeping overgrowth of invasive Himalayan blackberry along the trails. For the median visitor, who’s just passing through, Yosemite appears crowded but largely operational.

Half Dome looms large

Yet look a little closer and the cracks show: a sold-out rental bike shop, overflowing trash cans, and volunteers answering basic questions outside the visitor centre, taking pressure off the snaking line to speak to the rangers inside.

There is growing unease among staff that a diminished ranger corps will struggle to manage not just the impact on wildlife, but on people. Search-and-rescue operations, many warn, are now at risk of being dangerously underfunded. While emergency medical workers are technically exempt from Trump administration-related funding cuts and buy-outs, staff from other divisions are generally brought in to support large emergencies, so the loss of other division headcounts has spillover effects. Fewer staff can mean longer searches and delays. Yosemite averages around 200 search-and-rescue operations per year.

That said, there is still fun to be had in Yosemite. Buses full of neatly-dressed tourists and their Leica cameras unload onto busy sidewalks. Couples with heavy backpacks debate how much water they should carry. I hear Thai, Swedish, Dutch, Swahili. I spend 22 minutes in line for a cheeseburger that almost certainly emerged from a microwave — but more on this later.

---

Tourists attempting long hikes in high heels are easy to mock, but parks are for everyone. Created by the Wilderness Act of 1964, the modern parks system was premised on the idea that America contained landscapes that transcended ordinary measures of economic value. It was a popular proposition: on July 30, 1964, the House passed the bill by a vote of 374 to 1.

For a time, the parks were a rare bipartisan subject. Trump himself passed the Great American Outdoors Act in his first term to fund long-neglected conservation projects — though he later kneecapped the bill with two executive orders, seemingly to benefit his coalition’s desire to reduce the amount of federally-managed land.

As I glide my rental bike down a bike path along a quiet stream, it’s surprisingly easy to find a section of the meadow with no tourists or rangers in sight. That I could enter the park relatively quickly and find this place speaks volumes to the craftiness of the staff. Forced to embrace thrift, some of the park’s scientists are now rumoured to staff the visitor centres, while other scientists are asked to clean toilets.

But this MacGyvered resilience conceals a much deeper need. Today’s disinvestment did not begin with Trump. Since 2010, total NPS staffing has fallen by more than 20%, while the number of visitors has only grown. It is a formula for environmental and infrastructural collapse.

Yosemite's rangers — who are typically required to have a college degree and relevant experience in the field, if not a master’s degree — often earn less than $45,000 annually and must choose between long commutes into the park or college dormitory-like living conditions.

'Work isn't always pretty'

Housing in and around the park varies, but many workers reside in Curry Village’s tent cabins — simple white canvas tents atop green platforms with a propane heater, bear boxes for food, twin-size metal bed frames, and up to three roommates. Communal kitchens and bathrooms are the norm, while the only dining options available to workers are the same overpriced meals available to visitors — or whatever they can find after driving several hours to a grocery store outside of the park. Adding insult to injury, this summer’s seasonal workers in Yosemite had to endure up to six weeks without pay, due to Trump administration delays to workers entering the federal payroll.

In return, work isn’t always pretty. One ranger at another park described a recent emphasis on the cleanliness and experience of visitor facilities over other projects. “It’s more about maintaining campsites than conservation work now.”

Many (if not most) of Yosemite’s workers, however, work for a company most known for its failed school lunch programmes, Aramark, which operates the primary dining and retail concessions at the park. Operating under the name “Yosemite Hospitality”, the multinational food-services company won a multi-billion dollar contract a decade ago and now runs nearly everything: dining halls, gift shops, even the bike rental stand. “I’m not a real ranger, sadly,” says the young man behind the counter.

Last year, a San Francisco Chronicle investigation documented serious problems with Aramark’s operations: health and safety violations, employee mistreatment, even allegations of sexual assault and a suspicious employee death. Meanwhile, at the Ahwahnee, Yosemite’s historic luxury hotel, chunks of ceiling reportedly fell while Aramark looked the other way.

As for the microwaved cheeseburger I wait 22 minutes for, I joke to my boyfriend that it tastes like prison food — until I discover that it was, actually, prison food. Aramark operates food services in over 450 correctional facilities in the US.

In 2024, Aramark’s Yosemite service received an “unsatisfactory” grade in its annual performance review by NPS. That same year, Aramark reported over $17.4 billion in total revenue to its investors. Numbers specific to Yosemite are not disclosed annually, but in 2015, the Yosemite Hospitality concessionaire contract brought in at least $150 million in annual revenue.

Continue reading the rest of the article on Dispatch.

'The cool and crystalline Merced River'