Letter From the Regional Director
Dear Park Protectors,
The work we do together to protect our national parks spans weeks, months, years and generations. In our last Field Report, we highlighted our work to protect the Mojave National Preserve from unauthorized mining. This long-term effort to establish this preserve within the National Park Service began more than 40 years ago. After establishment in 1994, the work has continued to protect the water and wildlife in this 1.6 million acre landscape. When NPCA learned about an Australian company conducting mining activities within the preserve, including bulldozing roads, we jumped right into action to build public awareness and opposition to this egregious act. And in April, we filed a lawsuit in federal court to hold the federal administration accountable and stop the unauthorized mining. Also this spring, we learned about this same international company staking nearly 20,000 acres of mining claims right next to Joshua Tree National Park, threatening to industrialize the doorstep of this immensely popular park. We, alongside park supporters throughout the region and country, will be standing up for Joshua Tree. Between those two parks is the Mojave Trails National Monument, which just celebrated its 10 year anniversary. As you’ll read in the article below, NPCA is hard at work to protect the groundwater that flows beneath and supplies water to surface springs. These springs, sacred to the Fort Mojave and Chemehuevi Indian Tribes and vital to migrating wildlife such as bighorn sheep, have been threatened by the Cadiz corporation’s groundwater mining project. Because of NPCA’s work over decades, and in partnership with Tribal nations and local communities, we’ve been able to keep the water in place, where it belongs. But as my colleague Chance Wilcox describes in the article, Cadiz has restarted its partnership with the federal administration to exploit this water resource, and so the work continues. Further north, Yosemite is a park in crisis, as Mark Rose describes in his article below. With limited staff and the recent decision to eliminate the popular reservation system, Yosemite has descended into chaos. NPCA has responded by publicizing the hours long traffic jams, crowded trails and overall mismanagement of the park, and pressuring the Park Service to reinstate the reservation system. Additionally, developers are seeking to build new housing and luxury developments in and next to the park. A recent proposal to build over 100 new homes on private property within the boundary of Yosemite was met with strong backlash, including from NPCA. Our work has led the local county to propose rejecting the developer’s permit application. And in Southern California, Sally Garcia is building a base of park advocates. Read about her work below to connect people with their parks, and to turn that love of parks into action. None of this happens without you. Every action we take is strengthened by a community that believes our parks are worth defending — especially when it’s hard, especially when the need is now.
Thank you for caring about our national parks and working with NPCA to help protect them in their time of need.
Yosemite in Chaos: Inside the Mismanagement Threatening One of America’s Greatest Parks
Mark Rose, Sierra Nevada & Clean Air Senior Program Manager
Yosemite National Park is in the midst of a crisis. Mismanagement of the park has led to a combination of draconian staffing cuts, uncontrolled crowds, and runaway development outside of the park’s borders. Despite attempts to shift scarce park resources toward visitor-facing efforts and sweep the impacts under the rug, these overlapping threats are breaking through the facade of normalcy the park is desperately trying to depict. As a result, visitors to Yosemite are being met with chaos instead of the park experience they deserve, and staff morale among National Park Service employees is extremely low. If this mishandling of the park continues, we could see substantial and permanent damage to some of Yosemite’s beloved natural and cultural resources, which would directly violate the Park Service’s mission to protect and preserve parks like Yosemite for this and future generations. In response, NPCA is doing everything we can to try and prevent the worst impacts from happening. This most recent chaos started with Park Service-wide staffing cuts led by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. While adequate staffing in parks has been an issue for decades, since January 2025, the Park Service has lost nearly a quarter of its permanent workforce due to pressured retirements and resignations. In Yosemite, dozens of experienced leaders and subject matter experts have been pushed out, meaning the park must now navigate these overlapping threats without the decades of experience and institutional knowledge those employees brought to the table. For visitors planning a trip to Yosemite, they can now expect fewer park rangers available to provide information and interpretation, as well as longer lines or fully unstaffed entrance stations and facilities. Meanwhile, functions like scientific research, habitat restoration and long-term planning are grinding to a halt. This will make it much harder for the Park Service to keep the park clean, safe and protected in the years to come.
To address this staffing crisis, NPCA’s experts in DC and across the country are leading efforts to fight back against cuts to park staffing and budgets. We’ve been working hard to get an accurate picture of how many and what types of staff have been lost and to better understand how those losses are impacting parks. We’ve also been the leading source of up-to-date information for the media, successfully highlighting the Park Service’s staffing challenges in thousands of news stories nationwide. NPCA is also working closely with public lands allies, businesses, local elected officials and members of Congress to advocate for more funding for parks and to prevent the Department of Interior from pursuing further staffing cuts.
There are now fewer Park Service employees available to handle the ever-growing number of visitors to the park.
For decades now, Yosemite has faced significant overcrowding during the park’s busy season. With more people driving into the park each year, Yosemite now regularly exceeds the capacity for how many vehicles its parking lots and roads can accommodate. This results in hours-long lines at entrance stations, overcrowded trails, viewpoints and facilities, and an overall degraded visitor experience. In 2020, the park enacted a series of pilot day-use reservation systems to manage crowds during the busiest times of the year. Those pilot systems were an immediate success, providing visitors and staff with certainty, while vastly improving the visitor experience. Given how effective they were in preventing chaotic overcrowding and resource damage, the park brought its day-use reservations back and continued to refine them through the summer of 2024. As part of this process, Yosemite staff began a multi-year effort to gather stakeholder feedback and lay the groundwork for a permanent day-use reservation system. NPCA participated heavily in this process and led national efforts to support the park in developing a permanent reservation system. Unfortunately, before the permanent reservation system was finalized, Department of Interior officials and Yosemite’s brand-new superintendent, Ray McPadden, took steps to significantly scale back the reservation system in 2025, and then eliminate it all together in 2026. Without a reservation system in 2026, the results have already been severe. During Memorial Day weekend, parking lots filled up before 8 a.m., and traffic controls turned vehicles away from locations like Yosemite Valley. Desperate drivers who were stuck in traffic for hours began parking their cars wherever they could, including on tree roots, meadows and other sensitive ecosystems. Impacts like these have been felt on non-holiday weekends too.
Looking ahead, until reservations are brought back, emergencies will likely increase while emergency response will be slowed by traffic. Park trails, viewpoints, and cultural and historic structures will be overrun, and Yosemite’s wildlife and park ecosystems will be increasingly degraded. This is why NPCA is dedicating significant resources towards uplifting these ongoing impacts with the public, in the media and with elected officials. We’re also doing everything we can to put pressure on Yosemite’s superintendent to listen to the overwhelming majority of park lovers and his own staff and bring back the reservation system. While reservation systems have broad support from the general public, the voices of those who care about Yosemite and its future are sadly being drowned out by a small but vocal group of wealthy developers who run hotels and luxury lodges outside the park’s gates. These developers now have the ear of high-level officials at the Department of Interior, local elected officials and Yosemite’s new superintendent. Consequently, over the last year, they have been granted outsized powers to directly shape management of the park in a manner that helps line their own pockets. As far back as 1994, Yosemite Superintendent Michael Finley sent a letter to local county officials warning that runaway lodging developments could require Yosemite to implement a reservation system. Regrettably, county governments ignored this warning. In last decade alone, 10 new developments with nearly 900 new hotel rooms, suites, cabins and glamping accommodations were built on the western side of the park, and there are proposals to build over 1,500 new units in the future. This is all on top of the more than 5,000 short-term vacation rentals surrounding the park. Despite hotel owners blaming Yosemite’s reservation system for lost profits, the reality is that the lodging market outside the park is simply oversaturated. All these new hotels and the vehicles they bring in have utterly outstripped the ability of Yosemite and its limited staff to handle so many additional visitors. While the Park Service has retreated after decades of opposing overdevelopment outside the park, NPCA is stepping up to help fill the void. Alongside local allies and community residents, NPCA is successfully advocating against additional unnecessary lodging developments at the county level. For instance, a campaign by NPCA and local residents recently helped convince a local county planning department to deny a permit for a large proposal just on the border of the park.
It may seem like an uphill battle and that chaos is the only option for Yosemite, but with the help of our members and supporters, NPCA is confident that we can help restore order in one of America’s most beloved landscapes.
Draining the Desert: Inside the Fight to Protect Mojave’s Springs from Corporate Extraction
Chance Wilcox, California Desert Associate Director
On a bright spring day in the Mojave Desert, I’m sitting on a large rust-colored rock next to Daniel Leivas, chairman of the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe. Together, we peer into the thicket of willows and arrowweed, from where we can hear the chorus of small frog songs joined by the subtle and steady buzz of flies and bees seeking water. A small trickle flows from the rocks below us – the source of Bonanza Spring, a sacred and beautiful fountain of life in the middle of Mojave Trails National Monument. Extending from this source in front of us springs life – a small valley of cottonwoods and brush, creating a verdant and lush slice of greenery against the dry ochres of the desert. Spring wildflowers are everywhere, adding their purples and yellows, pinks and oranges to the vibrant celebration of Bonanza Spring. Leivas removes a small, canvas-wrapped package from his bag and from it, takes a pinch of tobacco, sprinkling it on the ground surrounding the spring: an offering, accompanied by a prayer and much gratitude for everything this sacred place provides. He then carefully pulls out a rattle, made artfully from a gourd, sits on his rock at the source, and starts to sing. In the desert, water means everything. People and animals have depended on springs like Bonanza for millennia, migrating to these life sources for water, as well as food, shade, protection, and community. High in the Clipper Mountains, Bonanza Spring remains a sacred site for the Chemehuevi and Fort Mojave Indian Tribes. Water is the center of the universe here, and a company named Cadiz, Inc., wants to ruin the delicate balance of this ecosystem by draining the aquifer that feeds these springs. The company seeks to privatize this groundwater, selling it across the region for its own profit.
The proposed extraction would overdraft the aquifer every year for 50 years, decimating the Mojave Desert ecosystem and these sacred springs.
For decades, NPCA has been fighting alongside the Chemehuevi and Fort Mojave Indian Tribes to prevent Cadiz’s destructive groundwater pumping proposal from becoming a reality. As legislators, Tribal leaders, conservation advocates, social justice organizations and local communities have stood side by side, creating safeguards for the Mojave Desert and vocalizing concern for this destructive project, Cadiz has attempted to rebrand and find new ways to subvert the barriers that stand in its way. In 2019, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law a bill that would prevent groundwater extraction projects without state review first. This law stopped the Cadiz project from being developed unless the state first certifies that the project will have no adverse impacts to natural and cultural resources. Cadiz had already failed this standard in the eyes of state agencies, as the California Department of Fish and Wildlife had sent a letter to Cadiz’s CEO in 2018, stating that the project threatens protected resources and wildlife like desert bighorn sheep. In the decades-long fight to protect the Mojave Desert from this dangerous project, advocates, Tribes and lawmakers could breathe a sigh of relief – Cadiz had been stopped in its tracks and our water was safe. Despite these barriers, we have entered a new era of advocating against irresponsible development, and Cadiz is no exception. The company has consistently rebranded, recognizing that the company’s name is a poison pill in Sacramento, utilizing a long list of methods to stray from the Cadiz name and manipulate the public into believing in the company. Cadiz has preyed upon vulnerable communities throughout Southern California, promoting “water for all,” despite the fact that the profit would be for Cadiz. Taking advantage of the Colorado River crisis this year, Cadiz has pointed to low water levels as a reason why states like Arizona and desert communities should invest in its project.
Cadiz has pushed its self-funded scientific reports that demonstrate that its extraction plan is sustainable and that sacred springs like Bonanza are not groundwater-connected, but rather rain-fed, which has all been debunked by the region’s best hydrologists.
Additionally, Cadiz has begun hiding behind different names, shielding itself behind a subsidiary called the Fenner Gap Mutual Water Company, which hired the consulting firm of David Bernhardt, former secretary of the interior under the first Trump administration. Despite barriers of state environmental review, the company is fueled by encouragement from this new Trump administration. The administration’s Environmental Protection Agency has invited Cadiz to apply for funding under the Water Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act (WIFIA) program, while the Bureau of Reclamation signed a memorandum of understanding with Cadiz in an attempt to also find funding and a path forward for the project. After being blocked in federal court a few years ago, Cadiz reapplied for a pipeline permit with the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to transport the water, which the BLM is evaluating without studying the impacts of the actual groundwater-pumping project and without public review. The company’s actions prove that Cadiz stands by its intentions to extract the Mojave Desert’s groundwater. At every stage of this battle, NPCA has successfully fought back, maintaining a partnership with the Chemehuevi and Fort Mojave Indian Tribes, building bridges with communities and emphasizing that this is a landscape worth protecting. Late last year, after Tribes and NPCA advocated, the Arizona Water Infrastructure Finance Authority rejected financing the Cadiz proposal, realizing it is an unsustainable, unreliable proposal and not a solution to the Colorado River crisis. Over the decades, Tribes and communities, legislators and leaders have all proven that they do not support the project.
Our water, our springs, our desert and a sustained future for this ecosystem are all on the line, and NPCA will always work tirelessly to protect them so that each of us can continue to sit and sing by sacred springs.
Where Advocacy Begins: Building Community for Our Parks.
Sally Garica, Pacific Region Outreach Manager
Many people know the National Parks Conservation Association as the organization whose staff members walk the halls of Congress advocating for our national parks. However, that advocacy starts long before Capitol Hill. It begins in communities and building relationships with people who care deeply about protecting these places. That’s why outreach and engagement play such a critical role in how we advance NPCA’s mission. In Los Angeles and Orange County, this work is especially important. Just like our parks, the communities are diverse and vibrant. However, many individuals have not always felt connected to national parks or seen themselves represented in conservation spaces. To build trust, we meet people where they are. This allows us to create welcoming and accessible entry points to our advocacy work. That has taken shape through a number of on-the-ground efforts, including Civic Voice workshops hosted during LA Climate week that brought community members together to better understand how to advocate for national parks by equipping them with the tools they need to take action. Veterans camping trips and guided outdoor programs have created space for veterans, along with their families, to connect with public lands while building community and exploring pathways for continued engagement.
We also created more intimate spaces during our organization-wide Day of Action, with our “Postcard and Parks” event, where participants wrote letters of support to park staff. Together, these efforts have allowed us to connect more than 800 people to NPCA this year alone.
While these events create meaningful connections, the impact doesn’t stop there. Outreach and engagement are often the first step in building long-term advocates for our parks. Many of the individuals who first connected with NPCA through something as simple as stopping by our table at an event have continued to stay engaged with our work. Over time, some have gone on to attend advocacy meetings with elected officials, support our campaigns like Rim of the Valley or have joined our LA Young Leaders Council. My own journey reflects the power of outreach and engagement. Before becoming a staff member at NPCA, I found my way into the conservation field through community-based programming. In South Central LA, national parks and conservation issues weren’t always at the top of my priority list. Many of these places felt far away and I didn’t see a direct connection between these landscapes and my everyday life. Through community connections and opportunities to engage with public lands, that perspective changed. I began to understand that public lands, like national parks, are connected to our communities and I had a role in protecting them. That experience continues to shape how I approach outreach today. One of the most rewarding parts of this work is seeing others find their own pathways in conservation. We have had volunteers and fellows, as well as young leader council members, who started by attending a hike, a workshop or a trip and are now working in this field, some even stepping into staff roles within NPCA or partner organizations. That kind of growth doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because people feel welcomed, supported and like they have a place in this space. At the end of the day, outreach and engagement is about building a stronger, wider and more connected community of park advocates. Protecting and preserving our parks, now and for future generations, means investing in relationships, creating meaningful opportunities and ensuring more people see themselves as part of this movement.
This work is only possible because of the support of NPCA members and friends like you. Thank you for continuing to speak up for our parks and helping us build the next generation of park advocates.
Stay Connected with NPCA
The national parks we cherish face growing threats. By becoming a member of NPCA, you are directly supporting efforts to defend our parks, elevate community voices, and preserve the full, honest story of these places for future generations.
Credits:
Sunrise at Tunnel View in Yosemite National Park, California, USA — Photo by Christian B. (Adobe Stock) Yosemite National Park Entrance — Photo by Bill Keefrey (Adobe Stock) Glacier Point overlook, Yosemite National Park, California — Photo by losonsky (Adobe Stock) An Amboy-Desert Iguana in the Mojave Trails — Photo by David Lamfrom Sunrise view and cholla cactus at Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area, near Las Vegas, Nevada — Photo by trekandphoto (Adobe Stock)