A group of 61 California lawmakers are now urging the Trump administration to reject the proposal.
Page A10From§Eachthe wee small hours edition — 3 September 2026
California lawmakers move to block new backroad as Interior Department reportedly shops Yosemite land to a private developer.
As it ran on the front
On August 28th, NOTUS reported what Common Dreams summarized as America being for sale: federal staffers, citing unnamed sources and government documents, working a land exchange to hand a private developer a quarter-mile strip of Yosemite. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has said this administration is committed to protecting the parks. Six days later, on September 3rd, the New York Post reported a different story out of the same park: a new backroad being cut into it, and California's congressional delegation moving to stop it before it goes further.
Sixty-one members of that delegation signed a letter urging the administration to reject the proposal. They didn't need to attach a motive to do it. They needed the filing, the fact of a road going into a national park, and sixty other names willing to put theirs next to it. The Post's own headline called what's circulating a sinister theory. It is worth sitting with what, exactly, is sinister about sixty-one members of Congress reading a public land record and adding up the days.…
…(cont) Here is what the record actually holds, and no further than that: six days separate an Interior Department reportedly shopping a piece of Yosemite to a developer and a road crew showing up to build access into the same park. The receipts do not say the road runs to that quarter-mile strip. No filing has been produced that draws that line. That gap — not a conspiracy, a gap — is what a sixty-one-name letter exists to close, and closing it is supposed to be the job of the agency that six days earlier got reported doing the opposite of its job.
This is the part of the story where the guy at the end of the bar says "coincidence" and the room goes quiet, because Yosemite is not a subdivision with a zoning board that meets on Tuesdays. It is federal land, held for people who will never see the deed and never need to. A developer does not need a backroad to look at a view. A developer needs a backroad to move equipment, or buyers, or both, and a road does not build itself into a national park without somebody signing off on it. Sixty-one lawmakers are not alleging what that somebody wanted. They are asking the Interior Department to produce the paperwork, six days after it got caught, by its own account, not having any it wanted to show.
“Six days. That's the whole gap between the Interior Department getting reported shopping a slice of Yosemite to a developer and a road crew showing up to cut access into the same park, and it took sixty-one members of Congress writing a letter just to ask for the paperwork. That's not a theory, that's a calendar, and when public land suddenly needs a backroad, somebody's already picked out where the trucks park.”
“Land exchanges happen at Interior all the time, this is routine agency business, it's not some — did I say sinister, no that's the Post's word not mine — the point is a road proposal and a real estate report landing six days apart doesn't prove one thing about the other, and Secretary Burgum's record on the parks speaks for itself, actually let's leave the record out of this.”
The receipts
Even while repeatedly serving the interests of destructive industries, President Donald Trump and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum have claimed they are committed to protecting US national parks—but the Republican administration is now…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.