Yosemite land swap would give Kingsbarn a private road

The National Park Service has spent more than a year working on a land exchange that would hand a quarter-mile strip of Yosemite National Park, or an easement over it, to a company controlled by the Nevada real-estate firm Kingsbarn Realty Capital, NOTUS reported this week, citing four people directly familiar with the discussions and agency documents.

The company wants the strip in order to build a short road connecting an 83-acre property it owns outside the park's western boundary to one of Yosemite's main interior roads. The property sits about five miles from one of the park's ancient sequoia groves. Its existing access road is more than ten miles from a park entrance, and a visitor driving from the property to Yosemite Valley currently faces a circuitous journey of roughly an hour and a half.

The request is not new. USA Times' review of the reporting and the court record finds this same private road has been sought for more than two decades and refused every time, by the Bush, Obama and Biden administrations and twice by federal judges. The current Interior Department is the first to work to grant it.

Two decades of no

Period	What happened
Early 2000s	Then-owner Lewis Geyser seeks permission to build a private road into Yosemite as part of a broader plan to relieve pressure on Yosemite Valley. Plan collapses; the Park Service refuses further development inside park boundaries.
2007	Geyser sues to force the issue. He loses in federal district court.
2012	He loses again on appeal. Both courts hold that the government must provide an exit for private land enclosed by federal land, but need not authorise a new road where an existing one already serves the property.
Bush, Obama and Biden administrations	The request is declined.
2024	An LLC controlled by Kingsbarn buys the land, historically called Hazel Green Ranch, for $4 million, renaming it "Sanctuary at Yosemite" in records reviewed by NOTUS. It approaches Interior almost immediately.
Spring 2025 to present	Interior political leadership pushes the Park Service to arrange a land exchange.

Sources: NOTUS reporting; the 2007 district court and 2012 appellate rulings; agency documents and interviews as reported. Compiled by USA Times.

The legal holding from 2012 is the load-bearing fact in this story, because it explains why the request keeps coming back as an administrative matter rather than a judicial one. The courts did not say the road was a bad idea. They said the developer had no entitlement to it. That leaves the decision entirely with the executive branch, which is exactly where it now sits.

What is being asked of career staff

Under the rules governing federal land, anything the Park Service gives up must be replaced by land of equivalent value. The mechanics of that requirement are what career staff are currently working through: the parcel inside Yosemite has to be appraised, the Park Service has to identify land elsewhere in California it wants instead, and the developer then has to buy that land and hand it over.

Land exchanges themselves are ordinary. The direction is not. A former Park Service official described a swap that begins with an agency giving away part of a park, rather than acquiring land it wants, as an "unusual case," and said the secrecy of the pursuit made it especially so.

Staff describe pressure that is unusual in kind rather than merely in degree. Meetings with Kingsbarn are scheduled every few weeks at the direction of political superiors. Progress reports go to political appointees in Secretary Doug Burgum's office, and two people familiar with the process said staff have been berated for not moving fast enough.

"They want us to be responsive to the property owner and their lobbyists or people, and they want us to work with these folks," one person familiar with the conversations told NOTUS. Another said: "The political pressure being brought to bear is very unusual."

Kingsbarn chief executive Jeff Pori has attended some of those meetings with associates including Lanny Davis, a lobbyist who advised Bill and Hillary Clinton and who has represented Michael Cohen, Harvey Weinstein and the former ruler of Equatorial Guinea. Davis has not listed Kingsbarn or Pori as clients in his federal lobbying disclosures.

What the department has said publicly

A Park Service spokesperson told NOTUS that "no final decisions have been made," and that any land exchange or access proposal "would be subject to all applicable federal laws, regulations, and Departmental policies, including required environmental review and public notification processes." If a proposal advances, the spokesperson said, "the Department would follow established procedures to ensure appropriate coordination, transparency, and public involvement, consistent with federal law."

Two prior public statements sit awkwardly beside the reporting. At his 2025 confirmation hearing, Burgum said of the national parks: "absolutely we need to support and protect every single inch of those." On August 24 of this year, opening National Park Week, President Trump issued a message stating that "My Administration is committed to protecting every acre of our lands and preserving the cleanest air and water in the world."

Kingsbarn did not respond to a request for comment.

Why this particular quarter-mile matters

Yosemite is where the idea of a national park began. "The national park idea started in Yosemite with Abraham Lincoln's preservation of Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias," said Cicely Muldoon, who spent 40 years in the Park Service and about five as Yosemite's superintendent before retiring shortly after the president took office in 2025.

Muldoon described the request arriving again in 2024 as a settled matter being reopened. "We got an email from the new owner, reopening this issue that we felt was long closed. Whoever bought the land hadn't done their due diligence and realized that this was not a possibility by law, to build a new entrance essentially into Yosemite National Park for private purposes."

Her objection is a statement of statutory purpose rather than of preference. "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."

The precedent, not the acreage, is the thing being decided here: a quarter-mile strip is trivial against Yosemite's roughly 760,000 acres, but a completed exchange would establish that a park boundary is negotiable when the buyer of adjacent land asks persistently enough. There are private inholdings and adjacent parcels beside almost every major national park in the country, and their owners will read the outcome of this appraisal closely.

The appraisal is under way and, by the account of people involved, is slow. Nothing has been finalised, no environmental review has begun publicly, and no replacement parcel has been identified. Those are the three points at which this becomes a public process rather than a private one, and the first of them has not yet been reached.

Cover photograph: meadows in Yosemite National Park. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.