A National Park Isn’t For Sale
Leading backpacks into the wilderness was one of the great joys of my ordained ministry. During the summer of 1977, I took my first trip with a youth group into the high country of Yosemite National Park. A week later, we looped back to the trailhead; bruised, footsore, and longing for hot showers and flush toilets. The kids had a grand experience. I loved it.
Naturalist John Muir wrote, “Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul alike.”
In the spring of 1984, I strode down the short aisle of the chapel in Yosemite Valley, not far from the Merced River on a breezy Sunday afternoon. Surrounded by friends and family, my wife and I exchanged vows. One of the first sights I had as an officially married man was stepping out of the chapel with a view of Yosemite Falls, plunging over 2,400 feet to the valley floor.
According to news that appeared in the waning days of August, the Department of the Interior has been quietly maneuvering to sell or trade a narrow quarter mile slice of Yosemite’s 1,187 square miles. A developer, Nevada-based Kingsbarn Realty Capital, owns a chunk of land literally a stone’s throw from the park’s western boundary. If that smidgen of Yosemite is added, Kingsbarn will have easy access into an area first set aside for the American public in 1864 by President Abraham Lincoln.
Are you kidding me? A For Sale sign doesn’t belong in a national park.
I wish I were kidding. But if I am wrong, and this is “fake news” as President Trump delights in saying, I’m happy to admit being a fool.
I dread I’m not wrong or foolish.
One of the clichéd arguments I usually avoid is the “slippery slope.” Once a person or nation does one little bad thing, it can lead to a bigger bad thing that may keep tumbling down a seductive slope for more and more awful actions. We humans are better than that, aren’t we? We are not, to add another cliché, the old frog in the pot of water slowly coming to a boil as we change from happy frog splashing in the water to someone’s meal?
But the slippery slope and the once playful frog seem disturbingly relevant right now.
Why not give up a teensy-weensy hunk of dirt? The developer will be environmentally responsible, right? It’s just a strip of asphalt through a bunch of trees, right?
It. Is. Wrong.
We too often only think in human terms. A road. A car. A few extra people. No big deal. The land involved is within the transition zone of the Sierra Nevada, at just below 5,000 feet in elevation. It’s where deciduous trees transition to evergreens. It’s the home of bear, quail, ponderosa pine, California poppy, and a host of other growing, thriving, and fragile denizens of the forest. Whose home is it?
Our National Park System supervises 430 sites. I wish we had more and that we took better care of them. The 2026 budget for the Department of Defense over a trillion dollars. It is proposed to increase in 2027. The Interior Department’s* budget in 2026 is 42.56 billion. It will decrease next year. On a mathematical note, a thousand times a billion adds up to one trillion. I’d prefer fewer soldiers and more park rangers.
Sigh . . .
I’ve written my representative and the Department of the Interior. I will do more.
Of those kids on that first youth group backpack I led almost fifty years ago, one refused to eat the freeze-dried food because it looked weird. He dedicated himself to fishing for a meal . . . but never caught anything. He finally told me what he was doing. Or, not doing. We convinced him that dehydrated Mac & Cheese wasn’t so bad. There was the kid who walked in his sleep. There was the kid who tried to chase a bear. There was the kid who sprained her ankle, but kept smiling and walking and getting help from others. There was the last night, where we decided to celebrate communion. We didn’t have grape juice or bread. But we did have snow-fed water from the nearby lake and leftover cheddar cheese goldfish crackers from our snacks.
And so, in the realm of God, in the land of granite and glory, I blessed the not-wine and the not-bread and we gave thanks. It was the first communion I served as a pastor.
“Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in,
where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul alike.”
Thanks for reading. More next week . . .
in Peace,
Larry Patten
*The Department of the Interior oversees the National Parks, along with a variety of other bureaus ranging from Indian Affairs to the U.S. Geological Survey. See here for more info.
Photo by Bailey Zindel on Unsplash