Yosemite Valley is drowning in theme park detritus - is there any hope? Dave Pickford takes a look.
Which way eez it to touch Ze Capitan?” enquires a wide-eyed French hiker on the trail that leads through a huge boulder-field to the base of most famous piece of rock in North America. On a glorious October afternoon, the immense South West Face of El Capitan is washed gold and ochre by the sun, and glimmers down through the trees in monolithic response to the question.
The French hiker’s unwittingly hefty phrase - “touching El Cap” - seems to capture both the timeless dreams and ambitions of rock climbers worldwide, and at the same time to acknowledge a crucial, contemporary issue in the evolution of California’s Yosemite Valley: the debate over its visitor service provision and management infrastructure.
With the possible exceptions of the Grand Canyon and Monument Valley, Yosemite is one of the most celebrated - and visited - natural spectacles in the United States. Its ‘visitor profile’ is as wide a cross-section of American society as it might be possible to gather in one place, with the ‘standard visitor mean’ falling somewhere in between a 5.14 rock climber on a three-year road trip and a bank clerk from a small provincial town in the Mid-West. If you were to put two such individuals in a room together and ask them what they would like to do on a visit to Yosemite, each would come up with a response more or less incomprehensible to the other. Taking a “rad ripper on that dang microwire, dude” and “grabbin’ a taco down the crazy golf” are, one would suggest, mutually incompatible activities in an environmental management context. That is not, of course, to discount the possibility that there are 5.14 climbers out there who are also bank clerks in the Mid-West(!), but the point remains.
The issue of visitor service provision and management is clearly a substantial and difficult one. There is a profound and far-reaching conflict of interests at the heart of any service provision infrastructure set up in Yosemite. It is a conflict arising from the wildly different motivations and objectives of the Park’s visitors, from the different activities those visitors wish to pursue and the services set up to support them, from the dichotomy posed by the conflicting ideologies of environmental preservationists and wilderness enthusiasts on one side, and the proponents of a mainstream tourism infrastructure on the other.
It could be argued that this is a purely ideological debate and has no real basis in the day-to-day service and infrastructure management issues in Yosemite. But to dismiss this argument I’d simply guide you to consider the gridlock around the Valley’s loop-road. Total gridlock is the norm on most summer-holiday season weekends, consisting mainly of vehicles with an average engine capacity of 5000cc (and that’s no exaggeration) belching out exhaust gases into the pine and cypress glades beside the Merced River. This is a real and pressing issue demanding an immediate practical solution.
The importance of Yosemite in relation to both climbers and the wider public has perhaps never been so acute as it is today. An estimated 3.5 million people now visit the Valley every year (the head-count in 2004 ran to 3,280,911) yet only a small number of these visitors come to walk, climb, or to explore any distance beyond the boundaries of the loop road and its amenities. The problems arising from the issue of mainstream tourism in the Valley, of the mushrooming of a ‘theme park’ business agenda in the alien context of a wilderness environment, are both staggeringly obvious and extremely challenging to solve.
In Zion National Park in Utah, a scheme was established in 2000 which replaces private vehicle use in the Park with a free shuttle bus service: an illuminating statement on the National Park website (nps.gov/zion) suggests “5000 vehicles [were replaced with] 21 buses”. The scheme has been championed by climbers and walkers as a great success – and interestingly seems to have gained substantial support from the wider public. Although there is now a free shuttle bus service in the Valley, the likelihood of such a scheme being implemented in Yosemite would appear to be very marginal indeed.
Today, Yosemite is a different place to that which John Muir wrote so vividly about at the turn of the twentieth century, and which Ansel Adams celebrated through the lens of his camera. That peculiar human desire for kitsch, generic to western-influenced popular culture around the world, has created a number of remarkable anomalies that jar against the real Yosemite of mountainous trails, thundering waterfalls, and huge granite walls.
If he were given a posthumous glimpse of Yosemite Village on a busy Sunday in 2007, John Muir might well think he’d been reincarnated onto a NASA moon-base, populated as it is by impossibly gargantuan vehicles transporting equally outsized individuals between various facilities. As if to add an absurdist dimension to Yosemite’s ‘Moon Base Alpha’, the general store that serves the Valley is partially taken up by a Disney-esque junkyard of tourist tat, including a fifteen-foot tall cuddly replica of an American Black Bear, available for a modest fistful of dollars. And of course, there is always the option of taking a scenic tour of the Valley aboard a truck-driven tram, decked out for your viewing pleasure in an attractive and highly inconspicuous lime green.
Why has this incongruous detritus proliferated in Yosemite? For one reason above all else: the virtual monopoly held by Delaware North Companies (DNC) on the service-sector business infrastructure of the Valley. DNC is one of the largest privately-held companies in the world, with over 40,000 employees worldwide. The extent of the monopoly it holds on the service provision infrastructure in Yosemite is quickly evident from a browse of its commercial website dedicated specifically to its amenities in the Park (yosemitepark.com). All of the non-camping accommodation options in the National Park are owned and run directly by DNC. Only the climbers campground Camp 4 escapes their jurisdiction. This - the only Park Service run campground - is the cheapest in the Valley, and still is as magnificently grotty today as it was as the epicentre of the acid-and-flares climbing scene of the 60’s and 70’s.
The slick business operation of the Delaware North Companies’ running of the visitor accommodation and services in Yosemite National Park, and its facile charade of championing the environmental sustainability of its activities and presence, belies a sinister monopolised economy that benefits neither the Valley nor, in the long term, even the most service-needy of its visitors.
A brief comparison with Britain is useful and provocative here. DNC owns and runs The Ahwahnee Hotel, Curry Village, the Yosemite High Sierra Camps, Housekeeping Camp, Tuolumne Meadows Lodge, Wawona Hotel, White Wolf Lodge and Yosemite Lodge. To set this in the context of a UK national park, it is the effective equivalent of a single multinational private company owning and running all the Youth Hostels in Snowdonia, Plas y Brenin, all the climbing and outdoor shops in Betws-y-Coed and Llanberis, Pete’s Eats and all the other pubs and restaurants in Llanberis, all the smaller accommodation facilities in the Llanberis Pass area, and the Heights Hotel. Thus DNC holds an almost absolute monopoly - the most damaging kind of economic conglomerate - on the service and retail business in the Yosemite National Park, in which no internal regulation or scrutiny is necessary due to its complete dominance of the market.
A PhD in economics is not necessary to work out how damaging such a situation would be if it were to arise in the UK. Fortunately, this is almost unimaginable in a British national park (even in the shadow of the current expansionist and marketing manoeuvres of Tesco) because of the fact that no monopoly of the kind DNC has in Yosemite could have developed in this country after the Monopolies and Mergers Act (1965).
It is hard to avoid questioning the sensibility of the Federal decision-makers who have allowed this mushrooming of a mainstream tourism infrastructure in the Yosemite Valley. To put it bluntly, we are dealing with a system of service provision that is set up to cater specifically for the visitor to whom a burger joint, rather than a water bottle, is the definition of quality refreshment. I am in no sense arguing that people who do not wish to climb or walk should not visit Yosemite, simply that there should not be a system of service provision in the Valley that replicates that of a mainstream holiday complex, with similar shopping and recreational facilities.
As with the blind Federal usurpation of so many other environmental management and preservation issues elsewhere in the USA (such as the horrific damage to the Alaskan Tundra as a result of oil and other mineral exploration activities along the trans-Alaskan pipeline and the Arctic coast) in Yosemite too it has been the lure of substantial long-term corporate revenue and profit that has produced and driven the establishment of this mainstream infrastructure. And it is sadly inevitable that a majority percentage of the profits from the expansion of a consumption-centric, theme-park tourism are never re-invested back into the Yosemite National Park, but swiftly drafted back to the boardroom chiefs at 40 Fountain Plaza, New York City - the headquarters of DNC - and to the accounts of other subsidiary companies and their shareholders.
So, is the landscape of the contemporary Yosemite Valley defined as much by the debris of its commercial exploitation as an American icon as it is by the astonishing natural architecture for which it is known throughout the world? Does the DNC time-share salesman, canvassing potential clients back in San Francisco or Las Vegas, have a greater impact here than the environmentalist or ecologist? Is the figure of the itinerant climber, dragging a battered haul-bag back into Camp 4 after a stint on El Cap, usurped and ultimately displaced by the far more profitable presence of the weekending Los Angeles stock market trader, residing in style at the salubrious Ahwahnee Hotel? Perhaps. But there is a get-out clause from this dead end scenario, where monetary value appears to have taken precedence over the co-existing values of adventure and environmental preservation.
Fortunately, climbers and other wilderness enthusiasts are known for their refusal to adhere to common cultural trends, to be subjugated by authority, or to conform to the tyrannical injunctions of monopolising power structures. And climbers in particular are perhaps even better known for their repertoire of innovative methods for the evasion and subversion of the status quo of popular opinion. Despite the best efforts of Delaware North Companies to create a ‘theme park Yosemite’, the Valley still remains one of the pre-eminent rock climbing destinations in the world. And the scene in the ‘zero-star’ Camp 4, where virtually all climbers end up staying, remains a refreshing contrast to the tourist-junkyards nearby. For those who haven’t been, Greg Child describes it with superlative insight in his 1998 essay, Postcards from the Ledge: “beamed in from a Hunter S. Thompson story, there were rascals and blatherskites, petty criminals and acid casualties, kooks and misfits, natural-born losers and sociopaths. And they all flocked to Yosemite’s Camp 4, aka Sunnyside Campground.”
This was in the 1970’s and 80’s. The campground is a little more organised now, but the odd acid casualty still springs up from time to time, clutching a bottle of whiskey and jumping around wrapped up in a sleeping bag at seven in the morning. Just when you thought that climbing had moved on, grown up, and got sensible with modern times, such wayward characters still survive here. They are a fine reminder that climbing is still an essentially anti-establishment and inherently subversive activity, best suited to those who have chosen to resist the pressures of conformity. The long hair and the flares may have vanished, but the spirit of Woodstock ‘68, Jack Kerouac, Jim Morrison, and Apocalypse Now, all mixed in with a good dose of vagrant European eccentricity, is still very much alive and well in Yosemite today.
Amid this eccentricity and anti-establishment vibe you can still feel the real Yosemite - a far cry from the madding crowds of consumption-driven tourism. Around the late-night bonfires of Camp 4, the awesome presence of El Cap, Half Dome, The Leaning Tower and Washington Column are vividly felt. Those great names are caught in every snatch of conversation drifting around in the dope-smoke, as another gaunt team staggers in late bearing huge haul-bags after long days high on a wall. Another bong is fired up to the clink-clink sound of a major rack overhaul, and someone sounds an eerie blast on a digeridoo yet another time.
As climbers and wilderness enthusiasts we’re lucky. Lucky that we have the opportunity to more swiftly and easily access that ‘real’ Yosemite than people with more conventional horizons, who are sadly forced to tolerate the profuse and various detritus of one of the world’s largest privately-held companies that has proliferated across the Valley floor.
We can find the real Yosemite after less than an hour’s energetic blast up a spidery climbers’ trail heading up to the base of one of the cliffs, or after moving over just a pitch or two of perfect granite. It comes suddenly to life, with a rich transformative power, as soon as the human noise and traffic of the valley floor subsides. Suddenly, through that quiet and sublime benevolence unique to the vertical, we are alone again amid the true landscape of one of America’s greatest wilderness regions.
Yosemite is still one of the world’s ultimate rock climbing environments, and I’d argue that the Valley of Muir and Adams, Salathé, Robbins, Harding, Frost, Pratt, Chouinard and Bridwell, Charlie Porter and John Barbella, Ray Jardine, John Long, Ron Kauk and John Bachar, Galen Rowell and Greg Child, Todd Skinner and Paul Piana, Lynn Hill, The Huber Brothers and Yuji Hiriyama, Leo Houlding and Dean Potter can never be completely compromised by either big-business or poor management. And we can but hope that this Yosemite - the Valley of climbers, walkers, and environmental ideologues - will remain undiminished by any new leviathan the 21st century may yet confront it with.
Dave Pickford is a climber, writer and photographer based in the UK. He has a particular interest in the Greater Himalaya region, the Indian Subcontinent, and the Far East. See www.davidpickford.com
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