Yosemite National Park Is a Mess (2024)

Businessweek

Chemical spills, a ceiling collapse, indoor bears. Employees and park superfans blame the hospitality company Aramark.

By Laura Bliss
Illustrations by Wesley Allsbrook

August 6, 2024, 6:00 AM UTC

A couple of miles past the western entrance to Yosemite National Park, visitors pass from California into a postcard. The road opens to a majestic view of Half Dome, El Capitan and Cathedral Rocks—celebrity peaks if ever there were—which form the towering walls of Yosemite Valley. On the pine-scented floor of John Muir’s mountain mansion, the Merced River flows gently by the side of the road as signs point toward trailheads and tourist destinations. Not far from Curry Village, a cluster of tent cabins and eateries at the eastern end of the road, is a section of employee housing known as the Stables. It was there that Erin Rau found herself wrapped in a sleeping bag one broiling afternoon last summer, wondering whether she was about to die.

Rau was a little over a month into a seasonal job selling goods in the village’s general store. Almost as soon as she arrived from Michigan, she recalls, she got the sense this wouldn’t be the carefree, post-college summer gig she’d imagined. In the evenings, she was left alone to manage a bunch of fellow early-twentysomethings making the same sixteenish bucks an hour until the shop closed at 10. At night a family of ringtail possums would crawl down from the rafters to tear into a display of baked goods, a long-standing issue she says her bosses did nothing to resolve, apart from throwing away half-eaten muffins in the morning. Similarly, deer mice kept leaving droppings on the pillows and sheets in the cabin Rau shared with three other women. When one of her roommates complained, she says, management supplied a Ziploc with a couple of mouse traps, a mask, gloves and some hand wipes, leaving the employees to sort out the rest.

Then, one morning, Rau awoke with what felt like the worst flu of her life. For days she huddled in bed with the heater cranked up as waves of nausea rippled down her freezing, aching body. On the third night, one of her roommates insisted on driving her the hour and a half to the nearest emergency room, in Mariposa. “I thought I was dying,” Rau says. “I was shaking uncontrollably, I was so cold.” The ER doctor told her that, based on her symptoms, she most likely had hantavirus, a rare disease that can attack the heart or kidneys with stunning ferocity. It kills more than 1 in 3 people. And it’s transmitted by, you guessed it, deer mice.

Rau was shocked. Although there are signs around Yosemite warning that the mice may carry hantavirus, the disease is diagnosed in fewer than 30 Americans per year, and California averages two or three cases. When she asked for a note so she could request better housing, a nurse recommended she quit and leave instead. “It’s really unsafe to be working there,” Rau remembers her saying. “We get lots of people that get into really bad situations.”

Every national park has its risks. Entire books have been devoted to recounting the cinematic ways people die in these places lovingly described as America’s Best Idea. But Rau’s case wasn’t an isolated incident of neglect. Yosemite has become more dangerous for people and wildlife alike on the watch of Aramark, the private contractor that largely runs the developed parts of the park.

For decades, Aramark has threaded itself through American institutions by making meals that are just good enough for a captive audience. Think of the $8 hot dog at your last baseball game. The buffet at your college dining hall. The hospital plate with the industrial-grade meat. Over the past decade, Aramark has also extended its hospitality within the great outdoors. At several of the country’s showpiece national parks, the company is now the main concessionaire. In exchange for a modest cut to the federal government, it has the exclusive contract to sell almost everything you can buy there, save for the entrance fee. Aramark staff maintain many park-owned properties. And it seems the public is getting what it pays for.

Hundreds of pages of federal documents and interviews with more than 30 current and former employees speak to the costs, including chemical spills, a ceiling collapse, a viral outbreak, bedbugs and food storage issues that led to the killing of three bears. The majestic Ahwahnee hotel, where President Barack Obama and the Queen of England have stayed, is in shambles. The National Park Service’s latest evaluation of Yosemite Hospitality LLC, the Aramark subsidiary that runs most of the tourist amenities, is scathing by the standards of park rangers. “The Service is extremely concerned that the years of neglect in maintaining assets has directly impacted visitor safety,” says the report, which found the company to be noncompliant in several areas in 2023, including asset maintenance, environmental monitoring and hazard incident response. And: “The Service is particularly concerned about the state of the Wawona Hotel and The Ahwahnee Hotel, as they are historic assets and National Historic Landmarks.”

“We take our responsibility as stewards of America’s national parks very seriously,” Sheena Weinstein, director of external communications for Aramark’s destinations division, said in a statement that detailed some recent staffing changes. “When a concern is reported, our policy is to thoroughly evaluate the issue and take appropriate action. We expect our operations to consistently meet the high standards we’ve set in our industry, and the safety and health of our guests and park staff are always our top priority.” Weinstein noted that the company has been working with the park service for 35 years. She didn’t respond to requests for comment about the overwhelming majority of the specific claims in this story.

Aramark’s contract in Yosemite, worth approximately $2 billion over 15 years, is part of a portfolio of parks that includes Badlands, Bryce Canyon, Denali, Grand Teton, Olympic and part of the Grand Canyon. These contracts amount to rounding errors for the company, which brought in almost $19 billion in revenue in 2023 and had its best second quarter earlier this year. But Aramark has been expanding its park interests, including by acquiring a rival concessionaire. Yosemite isn’t the only park, however, where the National Park Service has concluded that the company is letting maintenance and other services slip, and Aramark has begun to face blowback.

To some degree, the condition of these cherished destinations is the legacy of regulatory deference and inertia, but it also reflects a kind of symbiosis. The national parks were built on relationships with concessionaires, and the federal government relies heavily on those businesses to run them. In Yosemite, officials have so far chosen to keep Aramark in place. “We appreciate and recognize the positive changes that Yosemite Hospitality has made so far in 2024,” a park spokesperson said in an email, adding that the park will continue to monitor the results. “We value our partnership and look forward to working together to continue to improve the visitor experience.”

“People just take it for granted” that places like Yosemite are being taken care of, Rau says. Around the time she recovered last summer, weeks after she first fell ill, her roommates discovered a large hole in the floor of their tent cabin that was surrounded by mouse droppings. Rau quit soon after. She’s since traveled to a series of other national parks, posting videos about her experiences for her substantial YouTube following. Despite everything she went through, she still loves these places. “It’s so cool that we’re able to have all these amenities and everything’s so protected,” she says. “But the people who work there, they’re having to put in the time to make all that possible.” And those workers, she says, “need help.”

America’s conception of a national park was born in Yosemite from business and blood. In the early 1850s, a gold rush drew miners to the valley, the homeland of the Ahwahneechee people. State officials raised a militia to kill and displace the Ahwahneechee in the Yosemite Indian War, part of what’s now called the California genocide. In the years after, a few squatters began operating hotels in the valley. By the time President Abraham Lincoln signed the Yosemite Act in 1864, donating 39,000 acres of the valley and its environs to the state of California for “public use, resort and recreation,” these hoteliers were well-established.

The modern concessionaire began to take shape in the 1890s, after John Muir and other early conservationists pushed the federal government to reclaim ownership of the park and clear out the garbage and sheep. The Curry family opened its tent village not far from where Rau would stay more than a century later. In the 1910s, borax millionaire Stephen Mather successfully lobbied for the creation of the National Park Service and became its first leader. At Yosemite he oversaw construction of the Ahwahnee, which opened in 1927 and is considered a masterpiece of the “parkitecture” style, which often employs native materials like whole logs and stone. An oft-repeated quote by Mather sums up his development-friendly parks philosophy: “Scenery is a hollow enjoyment to a tourist who sets out in the morning after an indigestible breakfast and a fitful sleep on an impossible bed.”

During this period, park stewards sought to expand the ways visitors could enjoy the scenery, including with attractions that seem, by today’s standards, bananas. Until the 1940s, when the NPS made them stop, concessionaires kept bleachers set up around the on-site dump, and encouraged tourists to watch bears eat garbage and fight for scraps. In the 1960s, President John F. Kennedy was among the visitors who looked on from below as workers disposed of hot coals by shoving the flaming embers off of Glacier Point, creating a waterfall-like spectacle known as Firefall. Concessionaires had been doing this most nights for close to a century by then and continued until Lyndon Johnson’s parks chief swore off the practice later that decade. It was unnatural, he said. Moreover, it was too popular. The crowds that flocked to see each Firefall trampled the grounds and clogged the roads.

Around this time, Congress passed a law that gave concessionaires the upper hand in negotiations with the parks. The Concessions Policy Act, developed under pressure from the industry, gave concessionaires contract terms of as long as 30 years, preferential contract renewal and a right of compensation for property improvements. The NPS was forced to cede the vast majority of park profits to concessionaires in exchange for as little as 0.75% of gross revenue, according to historian Alfred Runte. More recent legislation has whittled away some of those sweeteners, and higher franchise fees have increased revenue to the park service. But park insiders say the industry still holds considerable sway. Yosemite is among America’s most lucrative and popular parks, with almost 4 million visitors accounting for roughly $140 million in annual concessions revenue. The NPS has a $3.5 billion annual budget, a $21 billion maintenance backlog and little power to punish a disappointing contractor. “If you kick them out, then what do you do?” asks Jon Jarvis, who ran the park service during the Obama years. “We don’t have rangers to change bed linens.”

When Aramark took over Yosemite in 2016, it seemed like it might be an upgrade. The previous concessionaire, Delaware North Companies Inc., outraged park aficionados by squeezing the NPS for millions of dollars before it signed over the rights to the names of several lodges. (“Delaware North is proud of the hospitality and guest experience we provided for 23 years at Yosemite,” the company said in a statement.) To avoid further conflict while that dispute was in litigation, the park service temporarily switched out signs around the park; the Ahwahnee became the “Majestic Yosemite Hotel,” and Curry Village “Half Dome Village.” Aramark, by contrast, agreed to give the NPS a bigger share of its revenue (11.75%, versus 10.2% under Delaware North), complete hundreds of overdue maintenance tasks, make upgrades to several eateries and, within two years, move seasonal employees into new housing. “Yosemite is one of America’s most treasured resources and important natural preserves, and we are excited to work with the NPS as a steward of the park’s rich history and to help shape its legacy moving forward,” said Bruce Fears, then president of the company’s leisure division, in a press release announcing the contract.

The excitement faded quickly. Within the first year, Aramark was laying off Yosemite staff, including many of the longtime managers whose knowledge kept the place running. The NPS provides basic infrastructure and law enforcement, and it manages trails, interpretation programs and the hundreds of thousands of acres of wilderness within park boundaries. But Aramark is responsible for the majority of visitor services in the 7-mile-long, 1-mile-wide valley where tourists flock and most employees work. Its remit includes nine lodging options, 23 restaurants and cafes, 15 gift shops and grocery stores, a shuttle system, mule and horseback rides, a ski mountain and mountaineering school, four swimming pools, three gas stations, an on-call tow truck service and a golf course. “I don’t think they realized they were going to be managing a city,” says Bob Seddon, a retired California Highway Patrol supervisor who worked as a seasonal driver in Yosemite from 2011 to 2018.

According to NPS feedback on Aramark’s performance, visitors noticed when wait times for the shuttles between lodges and trailheads began to tick up, from the advertised 20 to 30 minutes to more like 45. The 2018 NPS evaluation said Aramark “failed to hire the appropriate number of drivers to make use of the entire fleet.” There were fewer maintenance technicians on staff, too. The results: more breakdowns, more overcrowding and more visitors left stranded in the middle of the park. At one point, apparently not knowing what else to do, a crowd of people tried to force a bus to halt by forming a human chain in the road, federal documents show.

In 2019, when the transit system was starting to stabilize (the NPS reported that Aramark “still fell short” but that the shuttle program “saw an improvement”), the company got into worse trouble. A norovirus outbreak sickened more than 100 visitors and employees, and Aramark didn’t report the situation to the park service right away, a violation of its contract, according to its 2019 NPS evaluation. The source of the outbreak wasn’t identified, but the NPS later found the Aramark-run kitchens in need of improvement, and said the company eventually addressed the issue by upgrading its cleaning products. Its 2019 review shows that Aramark also failed to report a bedbug infestation in an employee dorm. For the second year in a row, the NPS evaluators rated Aramark’s work at Yosemite as “marginal”—grounds to terminate its contract, according to NPS policy. Instead, Yosemite Superintendent Cicely Muldoon exercised her authority to adjust the company’s score. She bumped its official rating up to “satisfactory” because of “strong collaboration exhibited by Yosemite Hospitality in a public health crisis.”

Muldoon’s office didn’t respond to requests to explain the score change, but a spokesperson said in a statement that NPS is committed to keeping contractors’ policies in line with its own high standards. “We work diligently to identify and document issues and expect our concessioners to identify and implement solutions,” the Yosemite spokesperson said. According to the agency, superintendents are trained to take Covid and other business disruptions into account when evaluating a concessionaire’s performance.

Aramark was making some of its promised renovations during this time. By 2020 it had remodeled the main food court at Yosemite Valley Lodge and a sandwich shop in Yosemite Village. It was at work on other repairs when the Covid-19 lockdown closed the park. Yosemite reopened that June after less than three months, but its concessions revenue fell by almost 50% on the year. While tourists stayed home, Aramark laid off or furloughed “large numbers” of employees, according to its 2020 NPS evaluation. The cuts included contractually required positions, including the maintenance coordinator, and remaining workers were left struggling to keep up with repairs and administration.

Because park housing was tied to employment, Aramark also evicted dozens of these workers from their dorms and cabins during the pandemic, including a number of elderly staff who had nowhere else to go. Not long after, a video posted to social media showed the company’s vice president of operations hitting a golf ball into a protected meadow. “That hit the rock,” he jokes in the video, referring to Half Dome in the distance. In the company’s annual evaluation, park officials noted that while this executive was quickly terminated, the incident “indicated a lack of understanding or respect for the mission of the National Park Service.”

Aramark also struggled to address a far more serious problem during this period. While the park was shut down in early 2020, an Aramark employee who’d remained on-site was sleeping in his cabin when a co-worker sneaked in and “began to sexually assault the victim, biting and punching him during the attack,” according to a US Department of Justice press release. The victim managed to escape and reported the assault to an Aramark housing supervisor, who then reported it to a manager, federal documents show. But then weeks went by in which “the Housing Manager took no further action until the victim went directly to the Concessioner’s Human Resources division,” the company’s subsequent NPS evaluation states. “This constituted a lack of reporting of a ‘known or suspected violation of law’ as required by the Contract.” The assailant was eventually sentenced to more than 12 years in prison. Asked how Aramark handled his case, the victim, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals, says: “They didn’t.”

Subsequent NPS evaluations show a spiral of mishaps in the post-Covid era. In 2021 several bears had to be euthanized after repeatedly breaking into a food cooler and then wandering into a park hotel. The park service also found Aramark had been using two rooms in the Ahwahnee that the agency had ordered be kept offline “due to proximity to nearby water damage and concerns for additional ceiling collapse and mold growth.” In 2022, Aramark employees spilled 500 gallons of glycol, the potentially toxic main ingredient in antifreeze, at the skating rink at Curry Village, less than 500 feet from the river. In 2023 a chunk of ceiling fell on an employee while guests were dining at the Ahwahnee. Another worker said she steered clear of the area for days, fearing additional fallout. Months later, a porch railing at the landmark Wawona Hotel collapsed when a visitor leaned on it, injuring her when she fell to the ground. Once again, Aramark failed to report the incident to NPS. But the visitor’s mother did report it to NPS, describing the railing in a complaint as “completely rotted.”

Last winter a heavy round of layoffs reduced maintenance staff further. One worker, who requested anonymity for fear of losing their job, estimated that Aramark had cut at least half the department by the end of the year. The company, which scored “marginal” again in 2022 and 2023, is “just not fixing things,” says Steve Ullman, who recently retired from running concessionaire maintenance departments, including for Delaware North’s version of Yosemite. The 2023 evaluation rattles off a litany of damaged assets around the park, including railings, walkways, staircases, roofs and gutters, as well as problems with Aramark’s long response times to issues the NPS flagged for repair. The company just started meeting with NPS last year about potential designs for the seasonal employee housing that was supposed to be ready by 2018.

In her statement, Weinstein, the Aramark spokesperson, acknowledged the difficulties. “Employee housing in Yosemite Valley has been historically challenging, requiring special considerations for many legacy structures,” she said. “We are working in partnership with NPS to improve living conditions and construct new accommodations within the guidelines for historic preservation.”

Neglect in many forms has made Yosemite more dangerous, but chronic understaffing is the most visible problem at a glance. On the TripAdvisor page for the Ahwahnee, where visitors pay upwards of $500 a night, reviewers from the past year or so describe waiting long after check-in to get into their rooms. One expresses shock at being charged “5 star prices” for a buffet dinner of “college dining room quality.” Another compares the vibe of the once-opulent hotel to that of the withered Miss Havisham from Great Expectations. Water damage is visibly decaying the lounge’s historic frescoes, and the section where a chunk fell onto a worker is still closed off more than a year later.

“The experience is total garbage,” says Sam Kaeser, a retiree from Simi Valley who visits Yosemite with her husband multiple times a year. “The difference between what Aramark has done to the park and what the previous concessionaires have done is night and day.” At the Wawona Hotel, where the Kaesers stayed for years, she says housekeeping fell off so sharply that the couple started bringing their own cleaning supplies to deal with the bathrooms, then stopped staying on-site altogether.

Things aren’t much better elsewhere in the park. Three former employees of the Yosemite Lodge, an Aramark-run midcentury motel where reservations start around $230 a night, say managers continued to book people in rooms where workers reported bedbugs. One lodge worker who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation says they’ve seen peroxide spilled into the soil. This June, workers discovered a rat infestation in the kitchen of the Ahwahnee bar. Managers instructed an employee to spray bleach on the area without safety gear, releasing sickening fumes that caused another worker to break out in hives, according to an eyewitness.

Yosemite is a uniquely complicated place to manage. Unlike most other parks in the system, it houses year-round employees as well as an influx of seasonal workers. Many of its buildings are more than a century old. And complaints about lousy food and high prices are par for the course in national park tourism. Other concessionaires aren’t exactly beloved.

But Aramark appears to be in a class of its own. It’s continued to receive subpar grades at several parks while Xanterra Parks & Resorts Inc. (which runs lodging at Glacier, Yellowstone and most of the Grand Canyon) and Delaware North (Kings Canyon, Sequoia, Shenandoah) have scored mostly “satisfactory” or “superior.” According to NPS, 95% of concessionaires receive passing scores.

As at Yosemite, Aramark has repeatedly scored “marginal” at Michigan’s Isle Royale and Oregon’s Crater Lake. At the latter, where a string of visitors sustained serious injuries and 5,000 gallons of raw sewage spilled into a creek, things got bad enough that one of the state’s US senators, Democrat Ron Wyden, called for a federal review. Earlier this year, the NPS transferred Aramark’s contract at the park, which was supposed to last through 2030, to a new steward.

Crater Lake’s new concessionaire is a privately owned firm called ExplorUS, which operates lodging, restaurants and marinas at a number of smaller national and state parks. On its website, the company describes its specialty as turning around underperforming concessions. “I was gratified that the National Park Service acted upon my concerns,” Wyden said in a statement, “and believe any similar concerns about concessionaires at other national parks deserve serious scrutiny to protect both staff and visitors.”

“The challenges at Crater Lake National Park are not indicative of our overall business operations,” Aramark told the Associated Press, adding that it was working to improve conditions.

Republican Tom McClintock, the US representative whose district includes Yosemite, says that while concessionaires should be free to run their businesses in the park, canceling Aramark’s contract is “definitely an option” for NPS given the company’s challenges meeting its obligations. California Governor Gavin Newsom’s office declined to comment about the park. Democrats Laphonza Butler and Alex Padilla, Wyden’s counterparts in the Senate, didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Aramark seems to be feeling some pressure at Yosemite. In its statement, the company listed several repair and construction projects and noted that it has replaced top executives. That includes the regional vice president for Aramark’s leisure division, who as recently as 2021 won the company award for “delivering profitable growth.” During a visit right after Memorial Day, several hotels in the park were under some form of renovation. A number of maintenance workers have been rehired, and some managers have even apologized to employees for the inadequate staffing. “The mantra for everyone in Yosemite right now, as far as management goes, is ‘Don’t be Crater Lake,’” says another worker who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of losing their job.

Cancellation doesn’t appear imminent at Yosemite, but Aramark’s most recent evaluation there does suggest the park service is paying attention. Muldoon, the Yosemite superintendent, downgraded the company’s 2023 rating from “satisfactory” to “marginal,” due to “unnecessary accruing of deferred maintenance,” “unacceptable risk of damage to park resources” and other issues. Still, Muldoon bet the company would turn things around. “We appreciate the renewed energy and focus,” she wrote in a cover letter for Aramark’s 2023 evaluation, “and anticipate a productive year ahead.”

Given that the problems are, on some level, built into the structure of the NPS, “I think it needs a complete radical reform,” says Jarvis, the former director. The National Park Service Centennial Act from 2015 lays some groundwork to level the playing field with concessionaires, he says: It gives the agency broad authority to award new contracts without specifying how they should be structured, unlike earlier laws. Almost a decade later, the park service is still working on regulations to implement the law. But in theory, it could take greater control of its own assets and shift the balance of power back to the land it’s bound to protect. For change like that to happen, there needs to be pressure from political leadership, Jarvis says—and therefore, ultimately, from the American people. After all, the parks are supposed to be for them, and Jarvis says, “They should be pissed off.”

That postcard-perfect view of Yosemite’s grandeur may not have changed much over the centuries, but a visitor’s experience of a park is about its cultural trappings, too. (Some argue that park stewardship should be returned to the tribes that originally inhabited them.) The original law governing the NPS says parks must be “maintained in absolutely unimpaired form for the use of future generations” and that “national interest must dictate all decisions affecting public or private enterprise.” That means the park service is responsible, too, Jarvis notes. “It says, ‘Do whatever you can do with whatever power you have to ensure that these places are preserved for the next generation.’ And clearly, they’re not living up to it.”

The White House didn’t respond to requests for comment, nor did the Harris or Trump campaigns. For now, the sorts of free spirits and nature lovers who often wind up working in the parks have had little recourse besides social media. Last September an ex-Aramark employee using the handle mianoelia_ posted a viral TikTok detailing the conditions she said she endured as a barista in the park, which included crowded housing, unsanitary food-prep areas and a lack of protection when wildfires polluted the air, according to the Daily Dot. In June another former employee, James Blalock, using the shared TikTok handle fix.the.park, posted videos that revealed broken fence posts, cracked sidewalks and litter strewn around Yosemite’s restaurants and hotels. “‘Leave no trace,’ that’s what we say here,” he says in one video. “Too bad the concessionaire of hospitality doesn’t seem to give a sh*t.”

Working in Aramark’s Yosemite seems to bring out this kind of candor in even the crunchiest of park employees. Rau, who doesn’t think she’ll work at a national park again, wants the government to play a stronger role in protecting their natural and cultural resources, as well as the safety of employee working and living conditions. Recounting her experience in a YouTube video about her illness, she speaks in the same upbeat tone she uses to describe her custom van or her (healthy) time in Cambodia. Yet she has her limits. “I feel like I try to spin it positively,” she says. “But honestly, it was hell. Aramark sucks.”