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Staff Report –
Conservationists are calling it something that has never happened in Yosemite’s history: a piece of the national park handed over to a private developer.
The Trump administration is weighing a land swap that would transfer a quarter mile strip inside the park’s western boundary to a Las Vegas real estate firm that wants to build a shortcut road to its planned resort village.
The National Park Service is considering an exchange with Sanctuary at Yosemite, a limited liability company controlled by Kingsbarn Realty Capital, a Nevada private equity firm. Kingsbarn purchased the 83 acre Hazel Green Ranch property just outside the park in February 2024, reportedly for $4 million, and plans to develop a small village of homes and retail on two 40 acre parcels.
In exchange for the strip of parkland, the company would buy land of equal value elsewhere in California and hand it to the park service.
The problem Kingsbarn wants to solve is access. Reaching the property currently means a roughly 25 mile trip on public roads, much of it along winding, unpaved Forest Service routes. A short road cutting through what is now parkland would connect Hazel Green almost directly to Yosemite’s road network.
The company’s attorney, Lanny Davis, once counsel to President Bill Clinton, argues the shorter route would reduce vehicle emissions and improve driver safety, and says the plan came out of six months of work with Yosemite staff. Even with the new road, the company says the property would still sit 45 minutes from the Valley floor.
Almost nobody outside the company is buying it.
Governor Newsom blasted the plan as a grift on California’s public lands. Senators Adam Schiff and Alex Padilla vowed to fight it, with Schiff noting the courts already struck the project down once. The union representing Yosemite employees said ceding public land to private interests runs against everything the park service stands for, and warned about the burden on an already overwhelmed staff.
Climber Alex Honnold, the first person to free solo El Capitan, described the move as selling the future to cash out in the present. The Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks, whose board includes former Yosemite superintendent Don Neubacher, called the reported easement deeply troubling.
Hazel Green Ranch’s previous ownership sued the park service in 2007, claiming a right to build roads into Yosemite Valley under a 19th century mining law, and lost. A court blocked a similar shortcut road in 2012.
The park service has conceded to Congress that it lacks the legal authority to simply grant the land, which is exactly why the swap mechanism is on the table. Campaign finance records also show Kingsbarn’s chief executive donated to Trump’s 2024 fundraising effort, though the company says it has had no contact with the White House.
The Interior Department insists no final decision has been made and that any deal would face environmental review and public comment. But in a summer when Yosemite has already been squeezed by record crowds on holicays and weekends and short staffing, the battle over this small strip of land is shaping up to be anything but small.
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Reporting from ActiveNorcal.
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