This week we learned that the federal government is working on a deal to hand a piece of Yosemite National Park to a private developer.

Here is what has been reported, first by NOTUS and since confirmed and expanded by the San Francisco Chronicle, The Hill, and others. Since the spring of 2025, National Park Service staff in California and Washington have been directed to work out a land exchange with a company controlled, through a chain of limited liability companies, by Kingsbarn Realty Capital, a real estate investment firm based in Las Vegas. Kingsbarn owns an 83-acre parcel just outside the park's western boundary. What it wants is a road: a short connection across a quarter-mile strip of park land, linking its property to one of Yosemite's main arteries. Without that road, the parcel sits an hour and a half from Yosemite Valley by existing routes. With it, the parcel becomes something almost nothing on Yosemite's perimeter is allowed to be: private land with its own door into the park, ready for hotel development. In exchange, the government would receive land of supposedly equal value somewhere in California. Which land, nobody has said. The deal is not final. It surfaced in a document submitted to Congress, not in any announcement to the public.

Don Neubacher, who spent years running Yosemite as its superintendent, put it plainly to the Los Angeles Times: "I think it's basically illegal, number one. We just don't do this kind of activity. We don't transfer public lands to other entities."

That is the whole matter in two sentences. We do not do this. The strip in question is small. The principle is not. A national park is not an inventory of parcels, some core and some negotiable. It is a single promise, made in 1864 when Abraham Lincoln signed the Yosemite Grant in the middle of a civil war, and renewed in 1916 when Congress ordered these places kept unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations. The moment a boundary strip can be traded for the convenience of one developer's guests, every acre along every boundary of every park has a price, and every landowner pressed against a park line knows it. The value of this quarter mile to Kingsbarn is precisely the value of the promise being broken. Access no one else can buy is only worth something because it was never supposed to be for sale.

The parks are the one piece of the American estate that has never belonged to a party. They were protected by Republicans and Democrats in roughly equal measure for 160 years, and they remain about the last thing in public life that a family from any state, voting any way, will stand in front of and agree is good. Wallace Stegner called them the best idea we ever had. Whatever you think about how the country is being run, this is not how anyone gets to treat Yosemite.

So here is the ask. The Capitol switchboard is (202) 224-3121. Ask for your representative, then call back twice more for each of your senators. Say that you are a constituent, that you oppose the proposed land exchange at Yosemite National Park's western boundary, and that you want your member to publicly oppose it and to press the Interior Department for answers through the House Natural Resources and Senate Energy and Natural Resources committees. Yosemite is the rare thing you own without ever having bought it, and that makes every one of us a constituent here.

The idea of national parks began in Yosemite. It's a living argument of what we owe the future. It's your time to make your voice heard.