One of the joys of my childhood was exploring Yosemite National Park with my father. Anyone who has ever been there remembers the stark site of El Capitan, the spectacular granite cliff that looms above Yosemite Valley.
This time of year is known for Yosemite's "Firefall" spectacle, so named because the sun setting over the mountain lights up Horsetail Fall, and it seems for a few moments as if lava is flowing over the sheer face of the rocks.
Saturday evening, many hundreds of park visitors assembled to watch nature's light show, cameras and smartphones at the ready, when they were treated to an unexpected sight: an American flag hung upside down – a sign of national distress – some 3,000 feet above them.
As political protests go, this was a harmless stunt – imaginative, even. It was performed by park rangers and maintenance personnel remonstrating against budget cuts that have come out of Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency.
"We're bringing attention to what's happening to the parks, which are every American's properties," Gavin Carpenter, a Yosemite employee and military veteran who supplied the flag, told the San Francisco Chronicle. "It's super important we take care of them, and we're losing people here, and it's not sustainable if we want to keep the parks open."
Not everyone shares Mr. Carpenter's sense of distress at federal budget cuts. DOGE's measures, if not its methods, enjoy widespread popularity. But Yosemite National Park is not the unlikely place for civil disobedience it might seem. The nation's conservation movement essentially began in that hallowed place.
"National parks are the best idea we ever had," Western writer Wallace Stegner once said. "Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best, rather than our worst."
The idea was simply this: that the most beautiful mountains, fields, forests, and shorelines should be preserved for the enjoyment of everyone, including future generations. In Europe, the choicest land parcels were the province of the nobility. Americans didn't have queens or kings – or crown jewels to protect. But we had Yellowstone and Yosemite and the Grand Canyon and Acadia seashore – and many more natural splendors.
So these became our crown jewels.
Americans enjoy their birthright, as do citizens of the world. Nearly 4 million visitors made the pilgrimage to Yosemite National Park in 2024. A similar number will observe the geysers, grizzlies, wolves, and bison of Yellowstone. Both before and after the COVID pandemic, attendance remains robust in all 63 of America's national parks.
The law creating the park system was signed in 1916 by President Woodrow Wilson. At the time, 35 national parks and monuments were under government protection, and Congress anticipated adding more. From the beginning, though, it was always about more than majestic mountains, tall trees, and pretty waterways. The national parks tell the American story, with its conquests and conflicts: Who deserves to share this land? How should we treat its plants and animals – and how do we treat each other? For answers to these cosmic queries, we look to our parks.
President Ulysses S. Grant signed the Yellowstone Act of 1872, designating the Yellowstone region as a public "pleasuring-ground" to be preserved "from injury or spoilation, of all timber, mineral deposits, natural curiosities, or wonders within."
Eight years earlier, while Gen. Grant still wore his muddy Army boots during the siege of Petersburg, his commander in chief signed legislation laying claim on behalf of the state of California to the area that would become Yosemite National Park.
Among those who would make a pilgrimage to Yosemite's waterfalls and forests was Theodore Roosevelt. And after spending his first night in a Yosemite sequoia grove, TR enthused: "It was like lying in a great solemn cathedral far vaster and more beautiful than any built by the hand of man."
John Muir, Roosevelt's friend and fellow conservationist, used a similar metaphor while arguing against a proposed dam on Yosemite's Tuolumne River that would flood the scenic Hetch Hetchy Valley. "No holier temple," he wrote, "has ever been consecrated by the heart of man."
Muir would lose this battle. Hetch Hetchy's dam was built – San Francisco needed the water – and the scenic valley flooded. But Muir won the war. Out of this fight emerged the Sierra Club, along with a national realization that when it came to the great questions of land use, there were always two sides to the equation, or more. Profound questions about American race relations have also been tackled in the national parks. They still are.
The history of the National Park Service, like the history of the United States, didn't march in an unbroken line. By the mid-20th century, Park Service rangers had exterminated the northern gray wolf from Yellowstone. Rangers trapped wolves, shot them, gassed them in their dens, and clubbed them to death until they were all gone.
By the 1990s, however, Congress appropriated money for a request by the National Park Service and U.S. Fish & Wildlife biologists to reintroduce wolves to the park. It was a labor of love. Mollie H. Beattie, the first woman to head Fish & Wildlife, participated in the effort. Beattie died in 1996, as the initiative was taking off, but not before a friend noticed her rubbing cool water on the belly of a young wolf in Yellowstone to calm the animal before it could be released into the wild. Despite battling cancer and despite the cold April rain on her face, Beattie smiled and said, "Any day I can touch a wild wolf is a good day."
Fifty years after President Wilson created the park system, the National Historic Preservation Act greatly expanded the agency's role in evaluating and preserving the nation's historic and archeological sites. With that responsibility has come additional ones for interpreting the American Story to those who visit the parks and national and cultural historic sites.
"What happened here?" visitors want to know. "What does it mean?" Can an agreed-upon story that unites Americans, rather than divides them, be imparted by a government employee in a Smokey Bear hat? It's a tall order for National Park Service rangers and interpretative historians – as it is for U.S. presidents.
In 1938, Franklin Roosevelt confronted this dilemma at the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg. The Trump administration has thoughts – not all of them well-received – about the proper portrayal of what happened at the Stonewall Inn in 1969.
At Arlington House and the famous cemetery below it, the gravestones, as well as the remnants of the slave quarters adjacent to the Robert E. Lee House, are all part of the same story, one which is still unfolding. Nearly a decade ago, I wrote that in an era of enormous annual government budget deficits, the national parks may seem a luxury. They aren't. As Mollie Beattie once said in describing the parks, "What a country chooses to save is what a country chooses to say about itself."
