Maybe Olmsted can help all of us, including the National Park Service, remember what the national park idea is all about. The greatest luxury in Yosemite comes from what the Valley has to say, not just from its structures. But maybe his kids and friends would rather camp, as he used to. I am deeply concerned these days about Yosemite. I am old-fashioned enough to believe that national parks were not set aside to create profit centers for concessionaires nor to pad National Park Service construction budgets for park officials to shortchange the future.
Large crowds are seasonal, but new roads, hotels and parking lots despoil the park year-round.
I saw the trouble begin with an earlier development policy, Mission 66, when then-National Park Service Director Connie Wirth went to the American Automobile Association, not to conservationists, for advice. Park service people should have been jailed for what they destroyed at Tenaya Lake, just as I would now urge long prison sentences for engineers who molest roads until they are wide enough to accommodate big diesel buses. Left alone, the park service would get rid of Yosemite's autumn color with 2-stroke leaf blowers. In the 1950s, my attempt to save Yosemite from what photographer Ansel Adams described as National Park Service vandalism at Tioga Pass was enthusiastic enough to bring Horace Albright, second director of the National Park Service, to San Francisco to try to get me fired as executive director of the Sierra Club. He was not successful, but neither was I successful in stopping the National Park Service from demolishing Tenaya's granite domes.