Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 6, 1993 TAG: 9306060203
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CARL NOLTE San Francisco Chronicle
DATELINE: YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK, CALIF. LENGTH: Medium
But for anyone who cares about Yosemite, the message is clear: Go soon or stay home.
Yosemite will be beautiful for a little while longer, and then it will be overwhelmed with people and cars.
There is too much snow, too few rangers, not enough money. The park's reluctant advice for the summer: Stay home.
There was so much snow this year that the roads into the higher country will still be blocked into this month. In places, Superintendent Michael Finley said, the snow drifts are 18 feet deep on Tioga Road, which leads to Tuolumne Meadows and crosses the Sierra crest.
The spectacular road to Glacier Point is also snowed in. That leaves no place to send the visitors except Yosemite Valley, and Finley doesn't want to unleash a parade of cars and campers and pickup trucks into the place John Muir called "the incomparable valley."
The park has never been more beautiful. In addition to Yosemite's big waterfalls -- Yosemite Falls, Bridalveil, Nevada, Vernal and Illilouette, there are at least 30 more seasonal waterfalls that last until the end of spring, and others, called ephemeral falls, that last only a few days and don't even have names.
"The water seems to fall out of the very sky itself," the geologist Joseph LeConte once said of the valley in spring.
Some of the seasonal waterfalls are impressive for their height, such as Ribbon Fall, which drops 1,612 feet, the highest waterfall in North America. Some are simply beautiful, like Horsetail Fall, a thin stream that blows in the wind and sometimes never reaches the valley at all.
The waterfalls are at their peak, said McKenzie, in mid-May and toward the end of the month, as the snow melts on the rim of the valley, and the waterfall display will probably go on well into June and July.
Early June is also the time for that rarest of Yosemite sights, the "moonbow" at the foot of lower Yosemite Falls. It shows up only in the spring, when the falls are running full, and only in the days around the full moon, when the moonlight shines on the spray from the falls, producing a ghostly rainbow, silver and white with a touch of blue.
But June will be the beginning of a tough summer season in Yosemite. Not only is the park wildly popular (nearly 4 million visitors last year, up 1 million in just seven years) but also the National Park Service, like most government agencies, is woefully short of money.
"We have only a third of the rangers we had in 1974," said Finley. "We have only a third of the naturalist rangers. To patrol the place, we had 28 rangers on the night shift back then. Last year we had eight."
Finley had high hopes for President Clinton's economic stimulus package, killed in Congress because it was said to contain too much pork. Whatever the flavor, there was a lot of meat in it for Yosemite: $4.8 million, a big addition to the park's regular budget of $15.48 million.
He had hoped to catch up on a lot of backlogged projects, hire more rangers, do other things. Now all that has gone glimmering: The Park Service is so broke it will not be able to open at least two major campgrounds, Bridalveil Creek and Yosemite Creek, on the north and south rims of the valley.
But this may be the last summer Yosemite will be on a starvation diet. If Congress approves, Delaware North Companies Inc., a sports and hotel conglomerate, will replace Yosemite Park and Curry Co. in operating nearly all of the businesses in the park on Oct. 1.
The switch will be the biggest change in Yosemite in years.
The Curry Co. is owned by MCA, another conglomerate, but there is a big difference: money.
The old contract paid the government only three-fourths of 1 percent of its gross revenue as a franchise fee. The Delaware North deal calls for the equivalent of 20.2 percent of its gross to be put back into the park, including $4.96 million a year into a capital improvement fund run by the Park Service.
There are hundreds of millions of dollars in this for the government, because the gross revenue from the Yosemite contract is estimated to be worth $1 billion over the next 15 years, the largest concession contract of any national park in the world.
"I can't wait to have the tools the new contract will bring us," said Superintendent Finley.
by CNB