““It wasn’t Donald Trump; it was me, liberal Democrat Lanny Davis, former counsel to President Clinton, went to the Department of Interior, and we made the argument that this is a pro-environmental decision to allow this road to be directly built to allow the residents of this privately owned property to gain entrance or exit to the park,”” Davis said.
Thanks for your tip...pays to read...I don’t understand the reference to “residents of this privately owned property”.
What residents? They haven’t proved that there are any residents who need an entrance or exit to the park.
The park does not need any changes. There is more than one way to enter the park - from the west (Modesto) AND the eastern side over the mountains. The eastern side is trickier and probably the more traveled. We have entered from the west and left to the east into Lee Vining.
Leave it alone...
You’re welcome, I agree with you, though I haven’t been there for over 50 years. At the time, I much preferred Lassen, though I was never a back country traveller, for want of a better word.
I’ve used the northern (down along the Yellowstone River and down Paradise Valley) and the western entries.
But whatever. A land swap is not a giveaway. The question is whether there is an equitable exchange of value. There are plenty of bounday and inholder issues that could use some smoothing out. In many cases, it may be irrelevant to the park’s operation while solving an inholder’s problem.
The NPS cannot accept any property that lies outside the park boundary, which is established by Act of Congress. This comes up a lot around Civil War battlefields. In most cases, the existing park boundary does NOT include the whole battlefield. This is universally the ribbon parks, that were the dominant pattern in the early era of Civil War parks. Private landowners sometimes wish to donate battlefield land to the NPS, but NPS cannot accept it. Or one of the private preservation organizations may purchase an inholding but be unable to donate the land to the park until Congress acts.