Yosemite

WASHINGTON -- Lawmakers and environmentalists praised a new agreement yesterday that will result in a non-profit group's buying the Yosemite Park and Curry Co., but they questioned the way the deal came about and the future of other national park concessionaires.Curry runs hotels and other concessions at Yosemite National Park.When its parent company, MCA Inc., was sold for $6.6 billion to a Japanese conglomerate, Interior Secretary Manuel Lujan Jr. and others objected to foreign ownership of a national park concessionaire.

America's third national park, Yosemite, the home of spectacular waterfalls, silent groves of ancient trees and an unequaled alpine wilderness, celebrated its 120th birthday this month. The place John Muir considered "nature's temple" was arguably where the national park idea was born — a uniquely American concept whose enduring meaning is being proved again in the midst of an economic downturn, as millions of families have flocked to Yosemite and other parks to make memories that will last their lifetimes, to reconnect with nature and our shared history.

YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK, Calif. -- Beneath the imperious granite faces that stare out at one another across this fabled valley, the signs of devastation are everywhere.The river that roared up just after the New Year is a quiescent mess, its banks splayed across meadows, its new shape carved from the roads and highways that ran alongside it.Favorite campsites have vanished. Marks from the water reach eight feet on some buildings. The valley's high-tech sewer system is newly visible, in lengths of thick, broken pipe that lie scattered along with countless trees.

ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY DAM! WATER, POWER, POLITICS, AND PRESERVATION IN HETCH HETCHY AND YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK By John Warfield Simpson. Pantheon. 384 pages. Yosemite National Park is a beautiful land of betrayal. The name of the valley, with its towering waterfalls in California's Sierra Nevada mountains, was taken from the Yosemite Indians, who were massacred and driven from their sacred home by the U.S. Army in 1851. Fifteen years later, Congress pledged to preserve Yosemite as the world's first national park.

In the aftermath of massive January flooding damage to Yosemite Valley and other parts of California's most-visited national park, Park Service officials are scrambling to devise a system that reopens popular park areas in time for the summer crush, but also limits visitor access. (Yosemite gets more than 4 million visitors a year.) The leading prospect is a plan requiring reservations from every visitor, not just those who plan to spend the night. Officials say the system could go into effect as soon as May.Although rangers say they're aiming for a limited reopening of Yosemite Valley March 15, none of the valley's former 780 campsites will be open until later, and at least two campgrounds are targeted for closure.

YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK, Calif. -- Instead of a steeple, pine trees reach heavenward. Rather than stained glass, there are lakes that mirror the sky. And instead of icons and altars, there are towering rock formations and glacier-cut valleys that draw a hushed awe.Yosemite is nature's cathedral, a place that inspires near-religious reverence among the millions of pilgrims who flood its gates every year. That is why what has happened in recent months seems so blasphemous."It's a national park.

YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK, Calif. - Confectioners' sugar ices the valley rim. Fog hugs the pine-scented air, like steam from a sizzling meat platter. Half Dome's peak rises in the distance, a huge, half-eaten scoop of granite ice cream. All right. So maybe food images don't come to mind when visitors first lay eyes on Yosemite, quite possibly our best national park. But a new chef at the park's historic lodge, the Ahwahnee, is out to make the park a year-round destination not just for great vistas and outdoor fun but also for superb food and service.

Everyone can use a spring tradition like the one the Musbach family has."It's my boys' favorite weekend of the year," says Liz Musbach, who lives in Oakland, Calif.That's because every year at the beginning of April, the Musbachs head to Yosemite National Park for a long weekend with Liz Musbach's extended family.They oooh and aah over the giant waterfalls and spring wildflowers, watch the kids climb rocks and skim stones on the Merced River and gather for candlelight dinners amid the 1920s splendor of the Ahwahnee hotel (confident that the children are being entertained by their sitters.

When you mention the killings of four women this year in and around Yosemite National Park to women who love the wilderness, there is deep silence at first, and then a pall. "I've hiked in that area alone, myself," says Donna Hunter, owner of Mariah Wilderness Expeditions, a San Francisco Bay Area tour company dedicated to taking women into the outdoors. "But I won't do it anymore."There is some relief, too, since Cary Stayner, a 37-year-old handyman at a motel near El Portal, Calif., on Yosemite's western threshold, confessed last month to the slayings of Carole and Juliana Sund, Silvina Pelosso and Joie Ruth Armstrong.

For the first time in decades, the National Park Service i demanding a fair share of concessions income for the benefit of the parks and Americans for whom they are held in trust. The long-term sweetheart contracts with entrenched concessionaires have given almost nothing back to the park service, which reduced staff and postponed improvements even as the number of visitors to its 360 priceless properties soared.These privileged contractors typically paid only 75 cents for each $100 of revenue from the lodges, stores, gift shops, horse rides and restaurants.

The Snake River, as photographed by Ansel Adams, is a shining ribbon that curves through stands of virgin forest toward a distant mountain whose summit is lit by electric flashes of St. Elmo's fire. The image is one of the most dramatic landscape photographs ever produced of the American West, and it became one of the signature pictures that helped make Adams famous even among people who knew little about photography. By the time of his death in 1984 at the age of 82, Adams was the most beloved photographer in America, admired as much for his tireless advocacy for environmental conservation as for his luminous, heroic photographs of a pristine wilderness that was fast disappearing.

YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK, Calif. - Confectioners' sugar ices the valley rim. Fog hugs the pine-scented air, like steam from a sizzling meat platter. Half Dome's peak rises in the distance, a huge, half-eaten scoop of granite ice cream. All right. So maybe food images don't come to mind when visitors first lay eyes on Yosemite, quite possibly our best national park. But a new chef at the park's historic lodge, the Ahwahnee, is out to make the park a year-round destination not just for great vistas and outdoor fun but also for superb food and service.

Hoping to revitalize heavily used Yosemite National Park, federal officials will announce a sweeping proposal today to cut vehicle use and let nature take back some of the heart of the nearly century-old park. The ambitious project would reduce and centralize day-use parking and restore large tracts of undeveloped land in Yosemite Valley, especially along the Merced River, according to sources familiar with the plan. The plan does not go as far as a proposal made two decades ago that envisioned the removal of all private vehicle traffic from the 7-mile-long, mile-wide valley.

When you mention the killings of four women this year in and around Yosemite National Park to women who love the wilderness, there is deep silence at first, and then a pall. "I've hiked in that area alone, myself," says Donna Hunter, owner of Mariah Wilderness Expeditions, a San Francisco Bay Area tour company dedicated to taking women into the outdoors. "But I won't do it anymore."There is some relief, too, since Cary Stayner, a 37-year-old handyman at a motel near El Portal, Calif., on Yosemite's western threshold, confessed last month to the slayings of Carole and Juliana Sund, Silvina Pelosso and Joie Ruth Armstrong.

LATE ONE night two months ago, while my daughter was waiting for the brush of the tooth fairy's wings, two young men, Shayne Worcester of Maine and his friend, a neighbor of mine here in San Francisco, were ambling uphill across our street.They were walking home from dinner through a neighborhood so popular and lively and friendly that all of us who live here walk. All the time.We go on errands to Walgreens or to the movie store at midnight, to the family-owned cafes and restaurants and bars any evening.

YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK, Calif. -- Instead of a steeple, pine trees reach heavenward. Rather than stained glass, there are lakes that mirror the sky. And instead of icons and altars, there are towering rock formations and glacier-cut valleys that draw a hushed awe.Yosemite is nature's cathedral, a place that inspires near-religious reverence among the millions of pilgrims who flood its gates every year. That is why what has happened in recent months seems so blasphemous."It's a national park.

Washington--During the next few weeks, I plan to set foot on some of the most valuable land in America. It is valuable because it is undeveloped, and if there is a heaven it will stay that way.The very names of these places suggest remoteness and beauty -- the Desolation Wilderness, Tahoe National Forest, Acadia National Park. But they are remote no more, and their beauty is fragile. Just because they are undeveloped does not mean they are uncrowded, unpolluted or unthreatened.Since 1950, the number of annual users of U.S. national parks has multiplied by ten. This year alone, individual visits may total 275 million.

America's third national park, Yosemite, the home of spectacular waterfalls, silent groves of ancient trees and an unequaled alpine wilderness, celebrated its 120th birthday this month. The place John Muir considered "nature's temple" was arguably where the national park idea was born — a uniquely American concept whose enduring meaning is being proved again in the midst of an economic downturn, as millions of families have flocked to Yosemite and other parks to make memories that will last their lifetimes, to reconnect with nature and our shared history.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- Federal authorities have arrested a motel handyman in the grisly murder of an environmental educator at Yosemite National Park and said yesterday that he is also a suspect in the highly publicized abduction and killings of three female sightseers earlier this year.Cary Stayner, 37, faces arraignment today on a single murder charge in the killing of Joie Ruth Armstrong, 26, whose beheaded body was found near her home last week at the park's western edge.Investigators said they believe Stayner also played a role in the slaying of Carole Sund, her daughter, Juliana, 15, and family friend Silvina Pelosso, 16, who vanished in February from the Cedar Lodge, an El Portal motel where Stayner worked as a maintenance man."

MODESTO, Calif. -- A hunt for the killers of three Yosemite tourists is focusing on a small cadre of prison parolees who have a history of sex offenses, drug arrests and weapons convictions. A federal grand jury will begin looking this week at potential suspects, who include an aspiring Hells Angel arrested last month in the shooting of a Modesto police officer and the jailed man's half-brother, who has been in and out of prison much of his adult life. Authorities are also eyeing at least two of their ex-convict acquaintances and one or two women who may have had some role in the slaying of a Eureka woman and two teen-age girls, according to sources close to the case.