Yosemite National Park, a nature lover's dream, is slowly turning into a nightmare. About a month into working at Yosemite is when I started getting very, very sick. Hundreds of pages of federal evaluations going back to 2016, up until 2023, really point to how conditions at Yosemite National Park have become more dangerous for workers and wildlife alike. With the national concessionaire, Aramark, being blamed for the rapid decline. The popular Ahwahnee Hotel, where President Barack Obama and even the Queen of England once stayed, is in shambles. Everything from hotel ceiling collapses to chemical spills and mismanaged wildlife has made the park safety questionable. The national parks belong to the American people. We expect our national parks to be better managed and put demands on Congress and the National Park Service and the administration to step up and improve this situation. Aramark is this $9 billion global hospitality company that many Americans encounter in some way or another in the course of their

lives. It runs college cafeterias, ballpark concessions, hospitals, prisons even, and part of their portfolio includes national parks, more than a dozen of them. And Yosemite became part of Aramark's portfolio in 2016. Since then, with some variation, particularly related to Covid, they've brought in about $140 million a year. So over the 15-year term of this contract, it's worth a little over $2 billion. So what's going on in Yosemite is an example of a deeper, a more complicated and systemic issue that we have with concessions, private sector operations within the national parks. The law governing commercial concessions in national parks is unique to the National Park Service. There's no other federal statute like it. It provides lots of incentives to the concessioner. They make considerable profit. The problem is that the tools given to the National Park Service to enforce poor performance are extremely limited.

Allegations of Aramark's failure to meet its contractual obligations have been borne out by numerous incidents throughout the park. So in Yosemite, Aramark is contractually obligated to run about 9 different lodging options, 23 restaurants and cafes, over a dozen gift shops and grocery stores, as well as 3 gas stations, 4 swimming pools, a ski mountain, horseback rides, a tow truck service, almost everything you can imagine being available to you in a national park, Aramark was responsible to run. Some sources actually compared it to something like a small city. Just this past year, a chunk of ceiling collapsed onto a worker while visitors were dining there, a railing at another hotel in the park failed when a visitor was leaning on it, causing it to collapse, and she was injured. That was an incident that Aramark did not report to the National Park Service. The year prior, workers had spilled 500 gallons of glycol,

which is the potentially toxic main ingredient and antifreeze 500 feet from the Merced River, which flows through the park. The company had failed to report bedbug infestations, a norovirus outbreak that ultimately sickened more than a hundred people. The list really goes on and on top of that, dozens of former and current workers in the park who shared a number of other details about the company's management, including their housing conditions. I was at Yosemite for about three months, and one month in is when I started getting very, very sick. I remember when I first got there, I was put into a tent. It's almost like a military style tent where it's a canvas tent on a plywood platform. There was a giant hole in the floor that was letting in mice and causing like a mouse infestation. There were times when we had mouse poop in our beds on our pillowcases. There was one point where they were even nesting in our dresser,

in our clothes. Rau and her roommates were alarmed, immediately alerting the housing department as signs around Yosemite warned that mice may carry Hantavirus. I started getting major flu-like symptoms, really bad fever. At the hospital, they did a ton of different tests and they started asking me questions about where I was living, what it was like at Yosemite. And when they told them about the mice, they kind of put the dots together that this was most likely Hantavirus. At Yosemite and several other parks like Michigan's Isle Royale and Oregon's Crater Lake, Aramark has repeatedly received subpar ratings from the National Park Service. The National Park Service is planning to terminate its contract with Aramark, which owns Crater Lake Hospitality. And there the issues really echo Yosemite cases like a 5,000-gallon sewage spill and multiple visitor injuries that were sustained under Aramark's watch there. We didn't really see any change until a senator from that state,

Ron Wyden publicly issued a statement calling for a federal review of the contract. In December, I learned of very alarming issues with the private concessionaire at Crater Lake National Park. It was clear that NPS staff were working tirelessly to prevent the contractor issues from damaging irreplaceable park resources. And within a couple of months, Aramark's contract there was transferred to a new company. So, given all the complaints citing Aramark's substandard service at Crater Lake, why are they still being allowed to operate at Yosemite? We only have three major concessioners competing with each other: Xanterra, Delaware North, and Aramark. And as the net result is, I would say performance is mediocre at best across the entire National Park system in terms of quality of meals, in terms of quality of lodging, in terms of facilities, reinvestment in these infrastructures. Aramark appears to be feeling pressure from the mounting criticism.

In a statement, the company listed several repair and construction projects, noted the replacement of top executives, and rehiring of maintenance staff. But the National Park Service recently announced on Instagram that the 168-year-old Wawona Hotel will shut down indefinitely in December as federal officials increase oversight of the global hospitality provider. I think the public needs to speak out. The public says we expect our national parks to be better managed. We expect our experiences to be at a higher standard. We expect the food to be a higher standard. We expect our lodging to be a higher standard, and we need to invest in this so that our kids and their children can experience the national parks at their best.

Why Yosemite National Park Is a Mess

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