Edward Abbey Warned Us About This. Trump Is Doing It Anyway.

The Desert Solitaire author wanted fewer roads in national parks. This White House wants to build a new one in Yosemite for a private developer’s profit.

“Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit.”

— Edward Abbey

The first time my daughter saw a giant sequoia was hiking in Yosemite National Park when she was just 8 years old.

We’d made the trek into the Mariposa Grove as a late spring snow began to fall at the end of our Memorial Day weekend trip. I remember watching her crane her neck back so far she nearly lost her balance on the rapidly icing trail, trying to find the top of the Grizzly Giant, which was already about 3,000 years old. She didn’t say much. She just stood there, small hand in mine, staring up at something that had been alive centuries longer than the country we live in.

That’s what these trees can do. They’re profoundly humbling. They put your whole life in perspective in about four seconds flat. I’ve taken my family back several times to all three sequoia groves in Yosemite since then. And every time I return, I think about the fact that our national parks exist precisely because enough Americans decided, generations ago, that some things shouldn’t be for sale.

Now I’ve been warning you since Donald Trump took office again that he’s trying to destroy Yosemite. First it was through sabotage and neglect. DOGE’s layoffs gutted the park’s staff last year and the National Park Service lost nearly a quarter of its permanent workforce nationwide. At Yosemite, scientists, wildlife specialists, and rangers got pulled off their actual jobs to empty overflowing trashcans and clean bathrooms instead.

This year, it’s still hard to find a ranger who can help you when you’re trying to plan a hike or find a campsite. And the park is drowning in visitors because the Trump administration scrapped the timed-entry reservation system that had kept traffic and crowding manageable, over the objections of conservationists who warned it would mean hours-long waits and real damage to the park’s ecosystem. As I saw firsthand last month, it’s made Yosemite more crowded and a far less enjoyable place to actually experience wilderness.

But sabotage and neglect were just the opening act. Now we have reporting from NOTUS and Raw Story that the Trump administration is actively looking to hand over a piece of park land near the Mariposa Grove — the same grove that I explored with my daughter years ago — to benefit a wealthy, well-connected private developer.

Kingsbarn Realty Capital, a Nevada firm run by Jeff Pori, bought an 83-acre property called “Sanctuary at Yosemite” for $4 million in 2024. The catch is that it’s remote — a 10-mile, 90-minute drive from the nearest entrance. So Kingsbarn wants a private road punched through Yosemite itself to connect his property to the park’s central corridor, just miles from the ancient sequoias. In exchange, the Park Service would get land “of equal value” somewhere else in California (details to be worked out later, natch).

Yosemite National Park with my daughter | Susan J. Demas photos

This is exactly what I warned you Trump would do: sell off public lands to the highest bidder, whether that’s oil and gas leases or mineral rights (as we’ve seen attempted in Alaska), forests handed to the timber industry, or, now, a literal chunk of the crown jewel of the National Park System carved out for a well-connected developer.

This same week, the administration also moved to gut the roadless rule, a 25-year-old protection that has kept logging and mining out of tens of millions of acres of national forest. I talked with Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) about this earlier this week on Lincoln Square. The Trump regime is doing this while closing down Forest Service offices and research stations in the middle of wildfire season — possibly the worst possible moment to hollow out the agency responsible for managing forest fire risk.

None of this is new territory, exactly — it’s just that no one has ever said yes before. The George W. Bush and Obama administrations both faced pressure to approve a road through Yosemite for this same stretch of land, and both rebuffed it. Courts rejected the previous owner’s lawsuits twice. For 150 years, national parks have grown and never ceded land back to private developers.

But like the war with Iran that Netanyahu lobbied for — which both Bush and Obama turned down (while Trump gullibly embraced it) — this land grab finally found a willing partner. Park Service employees tell NOTUS they’re now sitting in frequent meetings with the developer, and that pressure to make the deal happen is coming from the top.

If this goes through, it won’t be a one-off. It’ll become the new operating model for a National Park Service that Trump has already turned into his personal fiefdom.

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Remember the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, repainted “American flag blue” through a no-bid $1.74 million contract that went to a company tied to a Trump donor? When the paint predictably peeled and algae bloomed, the administration blamed “vandals” and arrested an Olympic athlete rather than admit the truth. We’re going to see corruption and destruction like this on a much greater scale.

I keep thinking about one of my favorite authors, Edward Abbey. He spent two seasons, in 1956 and 1957, as a ranger at what was then Arches National Monument, which he detailed in his 1968 book, Desert Solitaire.

Abbey made the case that national parks should ban private cars entirely and stop building new roads into them. He didn’t propose tearing out every road that already existed, but he wanted visitors to hike, bike or ride horseback into the wilderness, with government shuttles hauling gear for anyone who couldn’t. That’s an extreme position, and it never won out (nor could we really expect it to in the country that put the world on wheels). But we have the opposite extreme under Trump: the idea that public land’s only real value is how much private profit it can generate, full stop.

There are Democrats who are fighting back. California Sen. Adam Schiff has said the administration seems “hellbent on moving forward in the face of opposition,” and Sens. Alex Padilla and Jeff Merkley have pushed back, too. We need more of that — from Democrats, and frankly from California Republicans like Tom McClintock, who represents the area and should want to protect it.

Because if this deal closes, it sets the precedent for what Trump will do with every other national park, monument, forest and seashore in the country.

Public land existed before Donald Trump and it will exist after him, but only if enough of us treat it like it’s actually ours — because it is. That’s a truth my daughter understood standing under those sequoias at 8 years old, even if this president never will.