On the Brink

摘要

It was a plan so far ahead of its time that it took a 100-year flood to make it happen. The 1980 manage-ment plan for Yosemite National Park, designed to "return the Valley to as near its natural condition as possible," called for removing more than 1,200 parking spaces, hundreds of campsites and motel rooms and lodging for 1,000 employees. Day visitors would leave their cars in satellite lots near the park entrances and travel the notoriously clogged valley drive in shuttle buses, providing (in the soaring phrase of an Interior Department bureaucrat) "a more resource-oriented visitor experience."