Yosemite is a Pit

Yosemite is a pit--a least Yosemite Valley. As far as national parks go, it's a downright slum. I've never seen anything like it around the country---filthy restrooms that are hard to find, rotting picnic tables, and an overall shabbiness that makes me wonder what Central Park must have been like in the mid 1970s.


The trails are ridiculously narrow anywhere in the Valley. It feels as crowded as the Eben Fine Park in Boulder where the creek comes out of the canyon, Or worse yet, China.

Even on a day of light traffic (yesterday, late fall, post-shutdown), it felt overrun by cars, mainly because of the mindboggling lack of parking and the face that the two-lane one-way circuit road becomes a de facto Interstate. Try making a left turn into a viewing area from the right hand lane with traffic zooming along beside you. I had to resort to my old Gotham driving skills to get into the little access road down to the Merced River.

The park discourages private driving, but the shuttle buses seemed unobvious about how to use them, and I didn't see many of them. It reminded me of mass transit in Los Angeles---just use it, people.

Yes, it is heavily visited, but so are other parks, even in California. Sequoia NP is awesome, for example.

It's a disgrace for the country, and a California blight/

I realized there are all sorts of politics over this situation. But the comparison to Central Park makes me realize Yosemite is in a sense an urban park. It's perhaps the the least maintained and most neglected urban park of the Greater Bay Area Metropolis. That's OK by me, actually. I'm not expecting pristine wild. But I don't want to be grossed out.

Looking up at the beautiful rock walls of El Capitan yesterday, I could hear the thought that must be whispered inside so many people's heads: wouldn't it be awesome to see this valley as Muir did, so pristine and without all these messy cars and crowds?

I suspect this is part of the politics of the Yosemite Disgrace---just let all the amenities rot away and make the whole place much more wild. At the least, prohibit private traffic.

OK---perhaps a change of paradigm is necessary, but which change?

Kings Canyon National Park, just to south in the Sierra, supposedly has "ten Yosemites" in it.

You can't drive in to them. You can go to the end of the road, as I did last year on a beautiful October day. It looks a lot like Yosemite there---a big flat valley surrounded by towering sculpted forms. Nearby are the highest of the Sierras. This truly is the gate to some kind of heaven. But to get to any of those valleys I mentioned, you have to hike over the passes, backpack style like a hobbit on a quest.

I like to ask people: what's your personal opinion of those remote valleys in Kings Canyon? Do they match up to Yosemite?