Yosemite National Park Planning Update, Vol. 13, page 2

Yosemite National Park
General Management Plan
& Flood Recovery Update

Volume 13, January 1999

"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything in the universe."
John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra, 1869

What's Happened in the Past Six Months: A Snapshot In May 1998 (the date of our last issue), we were working on a number of planning documents simultaneously. Since that time:

We have read and analyzed over 5000 public comments on the Draft Valley Implementation Plan.
A U.S. District court judge issued a preliminary injunction halting the proposed work on Yosemite Lodge
Based on the full array of public input, we re-thought and refined our criteria for making planning decisions in the Valley (see article on pages 5-6).
Based on public input and in discussions with Secretary of the Interior Babbitt, we decided to integrate the Draft Yosemite Valley Housing Plan, the Draft Yosemite Valley Implementation Plan, the Yosemite Lodge Development Concept Plan, and the Yosemite Falls Design Project into one comprehensive plan for Yosemite Valley. National Park Service staff at Yosemite will use all the existing public input and the revised criteria to prepare the plan.

The rest of this Planning Update is designed to offer more insight into these four key developments.

Four Documents Integrated into One: the "New"
Yosemite Valley Plan

The four existing documents summarized below have advanced Valley planning considerably. The idea now is to use public comments combined with the new criteria to examine what was proposed in these plans, resolve conflicts between them, and incorporate new ideas and concerns that have emerged from the process.

All of these documents are rooted in the 1980 General Management Plan (GMP). The GMP was the NPS response to a growing set of concerns about conditions at Yosemite. With input from over 60,000 citizens, the GMP set forth five broad and intimately linked goals that have helped guide the planning and management decisions of the park to this day: reclaim priceless beauty, markedly reduce traffic congestions, allow natural processes to prevail, reduce crowding, and promote visitor understanding and enjoyment.

The Draft Yosemite Valley Housing Plan/EIS
The Housing Plan, first released in draft from in 1992 was designed to implement the GMP objective of removing nonessential employee housing from the Valley, and to improve housing for NPS, concession, and other employees who provide visitor services in the Valley. The latest revision of this plan (1996) focused on housing employees and administrative offices in El Portal. Destruction of employee housing in the 1997 flood lends a sense of urgency to employee housing considerations.

The Yosemite Lodge Development Concept Plan/EA
While bot the 1980 GMP and the 1992 Concessions Services Plan called for the removal of Yosemite Lodge buildings from the floodplain, the January 1997 flood insisted upon it by destroying approximately 50% of lodging facilities. Options for Yosemite Lodge were originally part of the VIP, but because of the loss of so many lodging units and employee housing in the flood, the NPS decided to accelerate specific planning for the lodge so as to return it to full service as quickly as possible. The resultant plan did not originally revisit decisions about the numbers of types of visitor lodging units made in previous plans, but the public process led to a number of revisions.

The latest plan would have:

reduced the number of buildings at the lodge as called for in the 1992 CSP
consolidated lodging into quadriplexes, cottages, and motels as required by the 1992 CSP
moved cabins into a previously disturbed uplands site north of the current Northside Drive, allowing resotration of riparian habitat in the Merced River floodplain and riparian habitat and the Yosemite Creek delta
eliminated the current bottleneck of traffic and pedestrians at the turn into the Lodge and Yosemite Falls by redesigning roads and parking areas
maintained Camp 4 (Sunnyside Walk-in Campground) in its current location

continued on the next page

Yosemite National Park Planning Page
Yosemite National Park Home Page

http://www.nps.gov/archive/yose/planning/vol13/2.htm
File created/updated Wednesday, 22-Dec-2004 10:12:59 Eastern Standard Time
Yosemite National Park Planning Team