Yosemite: An Editorial

April 15, 2005

From the May/June issue of Mammoth Monthly on newsracks now.

YOSEMITE

It’s spring up here in the Eastern Sierra—finally—which means that our strange, summertime affair with Yosemite National Park is about to be rekindled.
    If you live in Mammoth or visit regularly, you can’t help but have a relationship with one of the biggest and grandest backyards in all the world. In fact, long-time outdoors writer Dick Dorworth argues, it’s a relationship with some serious issues. We think we love Yosemite, but our love frequently takes the form of disconnection and destruction.
    In 1980, 2.5 million people visited Yosemite, and 80 percent of them were overnight guests—a pattern that had held since 1920. By 1996, though, Yosemite drew 4.2 million visitors, 80 percent of them day visitors, a pattern that holds to this day. Translated, there continues to be a dangerous level of car and bus traffic everywhere in the park. Incredibly, the Yosemite Valley bus system is the fourth most-heavily used mass transit system in the country, figured on riders-per-mile. Popular trails in the Valley are thronged with hikers.
    In the meantime, here we are, tapping our feet, eager for the Tioga gate to open so that we can crowd on in there, too—a troubling conundrum. But that’s how the affair with Yosemite works, as Dorworth eloquently explains in his essay:
    “The Yosemite experience that touched (John) Muir so deeply and that he described so movingly and extravagantly is no longer available to modern man. And the sad if salient reality is that Muir, like the rest of us, inadvertently contributed to Yosemite’s condition, and we continue to do so.”