Yosemite embodies the long war over US national park privatization | Hacker News Reader

Yosemite embodies the long war over US national park privatization

theconversation.com

115 pointsrntn61 comments

It seems like concessionaires and operators are increasingly abdicating their responsibility. I was at another site in CA that was so poorly managed the employee was trash talking management (for verbally and even physically assaulting the employees among other failures). The company got a fixed amount of money from the government for things like upkeep so they seemed to think it was in their best interest to spend as little as possible on upkeep to maximize profit. Unfortunately this was to the detriment of everyone staying at the site as the host burdens were so onerous for so little pay that the hosts kept bailing. And maintenance and janitorial was severely understaffed.

There's a similar situation in Crater Lake National Park, possibly managed by the same people (they manage hospitality at quite a few NP's):

https://www.opb.org/article/2024/02/18/crater-lake-hospitali...

https://www.opb.org/article/2024/02/23/national-parks-servic...

They got terminated due to numerous fuel leaks, consistent food safety issues and a significant number of visitor complaints. Employee living conditions were described as filthy and disgusting. And they manage a bunch of parks, including Yosemite, Grand Canyon and Olympic NP's.

The idea of running commercial services inside a national park seems to me to be ridiculous as a concept. The idea that a strip mall with grocery stores, hotels, and gas stations (and yes they have that in Yellowstone) is "national park" land makes the concept of a national park ridiculous.

Why not just take the areas inside national parks that are currently commercially developed, remove them from the park, and sell them off to private owners. Now there can just be a law that you can't build a damn thing on national park land, and then private companies can run commercial services on non-park land and there won't be this conflict of interest.

It shouldn't be built up like an amusement park, but some level of services seems reasonable. Water, bathrooms, gas for large/remote parks.

If you're advocating even all of that should be removed as well, then we're really talking about converting national parks to wilderness areas.

Bathrooms and water fountains aren't commercial facilities, so that's not what I was talking about removing. As for gas stations, I see no reason why visitors can't fill up before they enter the park.

While the point I am addressing here is only about the issue of commercial development I wouldn't have any problem converting them to pure wilderness areas. The entire concept of having a national park be a wilderness area that has little islands of crowded commercial areas with heavy traffic in the middle just seems strange to me and defeats the purpose.

If you drive the ring road in Yellowstone in its entirety you could find yourself running out of gas without taking at least one long detour into a town. That park is huge.

I don’t think having some amenities is a bad thing. Honestly the biggest problem is not their presence in places like Yellowstone or Grand Teton or Olympic or Mount Rainier it’s how poorly some of them are maintained and the sheer quantity of tourists especially in places like Yellowstone which is a UN World Heritage site. At almost every lodge I’ve stayed in in those parks they’ve been dirty and very expensive.

As noted, the park is huge. It's worth re-emphasizing how huge -- it's larger than several smaller European countries including Luxembourg -- over 3000 km^2. Expecting that people don't need gas in this vast area is absurd.

I thought the article would have mentioned that putting for-profit companies in charge of maintaining historic buildings doesn't mean those buildings will be maintained:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/news/2025/06/25/yosemi...

I'm a regular in the Yosemite rock climbing scene, and Aramark is a universally despised entity for many reasons (gross negligence, outright lies, rampant neglect). One of their executives recently lost his job for hitting golf balls into Ahwahnee Meadows.

However, until people would rather camp than stay at the $600/night hotel, and cook over a campfire rather than eat overpriced food, there will always be a lucrative opportunity in Yosemite Valley that is only available to the most politically-connected companies.

Why would Aramark try any harder, they have no competition.

They do. Xanterra.

I have family who worked for them at Yellowstone, Crater Lake, and Glacier NP. (They also have the concession at the Grand Canyon and Death Valley among others.)

Seemed like a fairly good company from what little I gathered.

There is competition, they took over the contract from Deleware North in 2014 IIRC.

Competition improves consumer welfare if the competition is on features that improve consumer welfare.

Without referees, competition can simply be on lowering costs and providing cheaper service.

If demand is in-elastic (there’s only one Yosemite) then simply invoking competition isn’t going to be a solution.

Without referees with teeth, the market can easily optimize for profit without giving a damn about anything else.

> However, until people would rather camp than stay at the $600/night hotel, and cook over a campfire rather than eat overpriced food, there will always be a lucrative opportunity in Yosemite Valley that is only available to the most politically-connected companies.

Blaming "people" accomplishes nothing.

Well, and no idea what it's like these days given ownership changes and time generally, but it used to be a very nice--albeit expensive--lodge, at least in the public areas including dining room.

When the north rim lodge recently burned down at the Grand Canyon my reaction was "how could they not deploy resources fast enough to save it?," followed by "who stands to gain from it burning down?" So I learn Aramark is/was the manager of the lodge. Fast forward a year and you'll hear about a joint venture between Aramark, someone high up in the current administration, and (as an example) Aman announcing Aman North Rim.

That's obviously conspiracy-level thinking and totally untrue, but given the attempt to sell public lands in the BBB, and the material staffing cuts at the park service (and more broadly), it's really easy to believe that these types of efforts will lead to cordoning off these spaces for private profit ("Yosemite's hundreds of thousands of acres, we're only taking away 20 for the hotel, no biggie!"). Gotta remain vigilant or I think that's where all of this ends up.

Note that the prices for the lodge at the north rim were pretty expensive already so not saying that hasn't already somewhat been the case, but it's not (or was not) physically off limits to the public or only reserved for the richest of the rich and that's where I fear this is headed.

> However, until people would rather camp than stay at the $600/night hotel, and cook over a campfire rather than eat overpriced food

I think this borders on "gatekeeping." There are other lodging options in Yosemite Valley which are much less expensive than the Ahwahnee. Yosemite belongs to the American people, and everyone should have a chance to enjoy it, not only those who want to sleep in a tent and cook on a fire. There has been paid lodging in the valley since before Yosemite was a park.

Food and lodging in the valley are expensive. The shuttle bus system is currently a joke. Aramark, Delaware North, and YP&CC (especially in the malaise years 1970-1993) have not always been good stewards, but in spite of that, the park is a national treasure that all should have a chance to enjoy, not just those in the "rock climbing scene" who want to stay at Camp 4 and rough it.

Aramark's contract should be cancelled. It happened at Crater Lake, and the NPS would have justification to do it in Yosemite, but the last two transitions between concessioners was pretty bad; there is good reason for the NPS to be cautious. If there was the capacity for better NPS oversight, the best move would probably be to break up the contract into smaller pieces and have more than one main concessioner. The Ansel Adams Gallery and Yosemite Mountaineering School are already under different contracts and there is precedent from other national parks (for example Glacier).

I think you're right that there needs to be actual competition between park services, but I am doubtful it will make that much of a difference. The public appetite for attendance absolutely dwarfs the capacity of the park. To meet demand you'd have to build a whole city.

I've given up on Yosemite. There are lots of other places to go in California (and beyond). Although they are starting to get crowded too...

You may be right, but even if the concessioners aren’t great, the valley can still be a wonderful, quiet, peaceful place to be. Especially in late spring when the dogwoods are in full bloom, the waterfalls are full, and the summer crowds haven’t arrived yet. After Labor Day is also nice. Summer crowds aren’t fun, but I do feel like there is another way of looking at it: so many people going outside and enjoying nature instead of looking at the world through their phones. There was a time pre-Covid when attendance and interest in national parks and state parks was kind of on the wane, and it’s nice that so many people want to come and enjoy these places.

How much of the demand is domestic I wonder? When I’ve been to places like this there seems to be a lot of international tourists.

Roughly a quarter are international.

I know I'm just some random guy and I'm hardly representative of the average American vacationer, but I tend to visit national and state parks on family road trips. There's a lot of amazing places in our country and I'm always talking to travelers about what they've seen.

Sure, I see a lot of foreign visitors, but I see a lot more domestic ones. I figure their money's just as good as mine, and it'd hardly be fair to complain about them after I've done the tourist thing in Japan, Spain, and Gibraltar.

> Yosemite belongs to the American people, and everyone should have a chance to enjoy it, not only those who want to sleep in a tent and cook on a fire.

Why? It's a wilderness park. The other 99.99% of America is always available to people who only want to stay in hotels and eat at restaurants.

Some of us can't.

I can sleep in a tent any time of year (although I'll pass if it's over 90° at night), but my girlfriend needs a CPAP and has back problems that prevent her from sleeping on the ground. We both love nature and have visited dozens of parks, but for health reasons we can't really hike more than a couple miles a day. We still enjoy the parts we can see near the roads and visitor centers.

Every time we visit a new part of the country, parks are the first thing I look for. Both of us spent our childhoods camping, but in her case her parents were too poor to take her anywhere too far from Oklahoma, and my family mostly just visited the southwest. Neither of us have seen Yellowstone or California's coastal redwoods or Yosemite or Crater Lake or Glacier National Park, and those are all on our bucket list.

Why do there even need to be corporate, profit-maximizing concessionaires? Couldn't the NPS itself develop this expertise and run them directly? So frustrating this trend where the government doesn't allow itself to do anything, instead funneling taxpayer money into the pockets of profit-seeking businesses.

Compare any airport with airport run concessions vs corporate run concessions. As long as the corp ones aren't a single corp running the entire airport, the corp ones almost always provide a better experience. They have to to attract customers. The airport run ones do not because they have a monopoly on concessions. They are almost universally atrocious. Bad incentives lead to bad outcomes. I think it's possible to setup corporate run concessions with positive feedback loops. I think it's impossible to do the same for government run concessions.

I completely agree that people should be able to enjoy Yosemite without needing to "rough it", but realistically this is something that is only accessible to people who can afford to spend upwards of ~$300/night (that's the room rate in El Portal, right outside the park entrance). Factoring in the park entrance fee, transportation, and food, it's easily a $1k weekend trip - not something the average American has access to.

The campsites are affordable and several have nice bathrooms/showers, but they get snatched up en masse at the beginning of the season by tour operators, so your only hope of getting one is by monitoring campflare.com.

We all collectively support an enormous commercial venture in and around Yosemite Valley, so we all collectively contribute toward increasing the price of entry and thus making the valley less accessible for everyone else.

What about being at the campsite's ranger office when it opens and being first in line to get a no show or canceled site? I used to do that, but it might not work anymore since Recreation.gov came online.

There are cheaper accommodations inside the park. I've gone there for $200/night for a room that sleeps 4. In fact, I've never paid $300/night and have gone many times. I'm sure you can pay a lot if you go at peak times, but $300 is not the base rate. Transportation cost will obviously add a lot if you're coming from a distance, but that's true regardless of the park's fees.

It's very possible to get campsites but you do need to pounce right when they open up, especially in busier times of year - https://www.nps.gov/yose/planyourvisit/camping.htm

I and many of my friends regularly wake up to do the 7am clickthrough on recreation.gov and often (though not always) are successful for the dates we're trying to get.

Maybe a certain level of gatekeeping is necessary in order to protect the parks? Requiring people to actually camp when visiting the wilderness hardly seems unreasonable. Particularly if accomidations are put in place for people with physical disabilities.

In a lot of Europe 'the great outdoors' is parks and agricultural land (not all of of course but a lot).

You have lots of great parks with forests and actual wildlife

I hope you don't repeat our mistake.

yosemite has absolutely incredible nature but come on, some parts of the valley feel like a highway, and you need to get there at like 6am to avoid queuing for everything including parking spots and behind other hikers on trails.

Yosemite is also a tiny, tiny percentage of national park land.

Maybe but you have so much actual wild land that you can support actual populations animals like bears, mountain lions, wolves.

I think part of it is also the purism of the outdoor community in the US. In the Dolomites you can climb an "alpine" route with anchors made out of giant rings held by a bunch of cement, then have a beer and steak at the hut and take a lift halfway down. In Chamonix you can take a cable car to 3.5km elevation and the crux of your day might be walking down to the climb dizzy from sudden change of elevation. I've no idea who owns all that stuff but if there was a 100% government run attempt to do it in the US the outdoor community would have an apoplectic fit.

In US the best exemplification of the attitude is when in WA rangers chopped rappel anchors in the middle of nowhere so someone could die on a sketchy natural descent because hey it is totally possible without bolts. Keep wild wild or whatever. I personally think the only reason not to put a Starbucks on top of Rainier is that the water boils too slowly up there.

Sometimes I wonder about the far future. Just looking at how hard it is to fight the urge by some to fell those trees for a quick buck, and seeing how preventing that requires a constant fight that comes back every 10 years and needs to be restarted all over again... It seems inevitable that at some point the stars will align and they will get their way.

I wonder, after 500 years, after 1000 years of industrialization, what will be left of Earth?

They’ll pave paradise and put up a parking lot?

A sad eventuality, but perhaps at least an interesting game.

Just saw an trailer for an unreleased game: rollercoaster tycoon, but for parking lots.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3031880/Car_Park_Capital/

I assumed it was being ironic?

> I wonder, after 500 years, after 1000 years of industrialization, what will be left of Earth?

In the last 150 years we went from almost zero protected areas to 26 million sq km of nature preserve, or a fifth of the Earth’s total landmass (excluding Antarctica, which is also protected). Out of the ~106 million sq km of habitable land, half of it is unprotected forest (37%) and shrubland. Only about a third of that forest is used for lumber so there’s room to protect about thrice as much as is already protected.

We have to remain vigilant but the global zeitgeist is very much on the side of preserving more nature rather than less. There will be more hickups but I wouldn’t be surprised if we double the amount of protected land in the next 100 years.

It's funny that a movement can be so successful and not just underestimate it's success but completely misunderstood the directionality of the trend.

It was nice while it lasted, but the "shining city upon a hill" era is dead and gone. There's a Project 2025 effort to lift protections for nearly 60 million acres, and that's surely just the beginning unless the U.S. un-loses its mind. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/white-house-set-to-roll-ba...

This is reading the past and forgetting the forces active since WW2 and the 1960s.

We do NOT live in those times, and the edifices propped up and successful in Europe and America, well and truly wish to undermine those protections.

It takes resources and it takes a middle class / working class for the collective will to matter. When those groups are under resourced, then it’s a question on whether nature appeals to some coterie of elites.

I was just talking about protected land mass. Since the 1990s the focus has shifted to protecting marine environments with 28 million sq km of ocean protected since then. It’s only 7% of the ocean for the moment but its only been a few decades.

I am against this reading of hopefulness.

It creates a narrative of momentum, which is necessary to not be overwhelmed by the situations we face, but it’s no longer viable to ignore it.

As just one sign - Academics in environmental science and conversation have PTSD, because of how hopeless things are.

In that same 150 year period, more species have been wiped out by man than in history.

As a species we are a force of nature.

I can find common ground that some of us are changing and that efforts are being made.

I disagree that it is inevitable- it’s hard won and must continue to be fight for

> some coterie of elites.

hate to break it to you but over the span of history, elites have been way better at natural preservation than the middle and working classes.

The elites have had power for the largest span of our history.

Correlation here is not causation. By that same criteria, elites have been responsible for the grandest acts of destruction and waste as well.

But I suppose someone may want to leave preservation efforts up to random chance and inheritance. Subjective preferences can’t be debated after all.

ok that's fine. I'll ignore the irrelevant whataboutism. as correlation is not causation what makes you think the elites would cease to preserve nature in the way they have? what is your mechanism for this shift in behaviour?

Elite doesn't need massive forests, they just need a little smaller forest that they can own themselves

There was no overfishing when only the elite could eat fancy fish, there was no overturns when it cost 50k for a weekend in the Bahamas or Benidorm. Erosion isn’t a problem when it’s a couple of gamekeepers and the occasional hunting party on the moors. Litter isn’t an issue when the staff outnumber the tourists.

Individual wealth does not cause environmental damage, it mass wealth that does.

I just don't think "protected surface" is a very meaningful metric when it comes to ecology. In those same 150 years, we (humans) have been responsible for the extinction of 83% of wild mammal and 50% of plants [1].

The global zeitgeist is very much not on the side of preservation, seeing how much irreversible damage has already been done, and how nothing is tried to prevent more from being done.

Let's not even talk of global warming, ocean acidification, ecosystem collapse...

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/21/human-ra...

> after 500 years

500 years sounds optimistic. Are we ignoring climate change here?

Michigan was basically clear cut in the late 1800s. It's quite forested now.

We lost the majority of the old, large trees, but the forests came back.

Jacques Ellul in full old testament prophet mode:

> The world that is being created by the accumulation of technical means is an artificial world and hence radically different from the natural world.

> It destroys, eliminates, or subordinates the natural world, and does not allow this world to restore itself or even to enter into a symbiotic relation with it. The two worlds obey different imperatives, different directives, and different laws which have nothing in common.

> Just as hydroelectric installations take waterfalls and lead them into conduits, so the technical milieu absorbs the natural. We are rapidly approaching the time when there will be no longer any natural environment at all. When we succeed in producing artificial aurorae boreales, night will disappear and perpetual day will reign over the planet.

The destroyers only have to win once. The preservers have to win every single time the destroyers make an attempt.

I do not understand. Is Yosemite under the National Park Service, which is within US Dept of the Interior, which is subject to FAR?

There is no justification for Sole Source Contract here. There are many companies that can run hotels, concession stands, and such.

Full and open competition.

It’s not under FAR because concessionaires are under a separate 1998 law. The concessionaire pays fees instead of the government paying for goods. There is still supposed to be competition but it can be limited eg incumbents may get preference.

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