The National Park Service has been quietly working on a proposal inside Yosemite National Park that would give a private developer a strip of land or an easement. The plan would trade that for land of equal value somewhere in California that has not yet been decided.
Jeff Pori wants to build a short road from an 83-acre property just outside Yosemite’s western boundaries to one of Yosemite’s central thoroughfares. Without that road, visitors to the property would need to drive an hour and a half in a circuitous route to reach Yosemite Valley.
Yosemite and the road request
The property sits about five miles from one of Yosemite’s ancient sequoia groves and would gain exceptionally rare private access to a park that is otherwise almost entirely buffered by national forests. Kingsbarn Realty Capital’s proposal is backed by the full weight of the Interior Department’s top political leadership, according to the reporting on the plan.
For more than a year, Park Service staff in California and Washington, D.C., have been working on a directive from Trump officials to parcel off a corner of Yosemite. Since the spring of 2025, the Trump administration has been looking into ways to cede a roughly quarter-mile strip of land inside the park to a company operated by Kingsbarn Realty Capital.
Doug Burgum and Interior
The deal would break with 150 years of American precedent at the birthplace of the national park system. The national park idea started in Yosemite with Abraham Lincoln’s preservation of Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias, and the federal government has historically sought to expand parks rather than give up land inside them.
Cicely Muldoon, a 40-year veteran of the Park Service and former Yosemite superintendent, said, “Our basic purpose in the national parks is to preserve these places unimpaired for future generations, not letting go of that for the purpose of private profit,” in response to the proposal.
Interior’s advocacy for the deal is described as a significant reversal of a pledge Doug Burgum made in his 2025 confirmation hearing. The planning process has created a tense environment inside the National Park Service for the people involved, and the replacement land still needs to be identified before any exchange can move forward.
Jake Whisenant climber story appears alongside broader Yosemite coverage as the park remains under close scrutiny over access, land use, and visitor routes.
The unresolved issue is the California parcel that would replace the Yosemite strip, since that land will determine whether the exchange stays narrow or becomes a larger trade affecting access near the park’s western edge.
California replacement land
Officials are still proposing a swap for land of equal value in California, but they have not decided which parcel would be offered. That leaves the plan at the point where the practical terms matter most: the value, location, and legal form of the transfer will decide whether the developer gets the road connection it wants or only a narrower property right.
