They Want to Cut a Road Through Yosemite

The courts already said no. Interior is still working the deal. You can still kill it.

In 1864, in the middle of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln signed Yosemite Valley over to the State of California. He put one word in that grant that still controls everything today. Inalienable. It could never be sold. In 1890, Congress went further and turned the surrounding land into Yosemite National Park.

That word is why you can drive into the valley this summer and stand under the same granite your grandparents stood under. It is why your kids will get to do it after you. Lincoln held that land for you on purpose, and every generation since has honored it. Today, a developer wants a private road through it. Maybe even a development, and you need to know the details.

The strip they want carved

In 2024, an LLC controlled by Kingsbarn paid four million dollars for 83 acres of former ranch land called Hazel Green. The seller was Lewis Geyser, who had owned it since 1998.

Since spring 2025, the Interior Department and the Park Service have been quietly working on a land exchange or an easement that would give that parcel a private road out to Big Oak Flat Road on the Highway 120 corridor. A sequoia grove sits about five miles away.

Nobody outside the process agrees on how much park land that road would take. One account puts it at roughly a quarter mile. Another describes an 11-mile strip. That gap is not a detail. It is the difference between a driveway and a corridor, and the public still cannot tell which one is on the table.

Here is who is asking. Jeff Pori runs Kingsbarn Realty Capital and sits behind the buying LLC. His lawyer, Lanny Davis, carried the pitch into Trump’s Interior Department and called it pro environment. Paving a strip of national park for private access is not pro environment.

Davis also described upscale single family homes. The proposed fact sheet uses the phrase planned commercial development. Reporting has gone further and described a hotel or a resort, though neither Pori nor Davis has said that. The Park Service says no final decision exists and any deal would require environmental review and public notice.

Now listen to what the people in charge have said out loud. At his January 16, 2025 confirmation hearing, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said the government needs to protect every single inch of the national parks. I personally don’t believe a thing Burgum said. Trump said the same thing in a National Park Week message and you already know his inability to tell the truth. Meanwhile, people familiar with the process told NOTUS, a nonprofit Washington newsroom, that the administration is pushing for approval and that park staff are getting berated for resisting.

Thank goodness some officials are pushing back. California Senators Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff oppose the deal. Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley objected through the Land and Water Conservation Fund list. Mark Rose at the National Parks Conservation Association has objected. Most Republicans in Congress have said nothing at all.

Courts already closed the claimed right

Remember Lewis Geyser. He bought those same 83 acres in 1998 and wanted to build an upscale resort with 300 units. Lincoln’s grant did not stop him. The 1890 act of Congress did not stop him. In 2007, his company went to federal court and claimed a legal right of way through the park.

He lost. Judge Oliver Wanger dismissed the case, with final judgment entered in 2010. The Ninth Circuit affirmed on July 27, 2012. Earthjustice represented the Sierra Club, the Wilderness Society, and NRDC, who intervened as defendants and helped beat it back.

Pay attention to who was running Interior while that happened. Bush’s Interior Department refused to recognize any right of way. So did Obama’s. Two administrations from opposite parties looked at the same claim and gave the same answer. That is what a settled question looks like.

So the road cannot be demanded. It has to be given.

That is the change and part that really concerns me. Current reporting shows Trump’s Interior Department willing to process a discretionary land exchange, handing over park land for a private road that a court already refused to grant. No court forced this. No statute requires it. Someone would have to choose it, and these are the guys and gals that would do just that without blinking an eye.

As of today, the deal has not been approved. Given this administration’s record on environmental rollbacks, I do not expect the final decision to come from a courtroom this time. It will come from a decision made in a building paid for by your tax dollars and by people you cannot trust.¹

The people in the room already know each other

Follow the money around this deal and you keep landing on the same small circle.

In April 2025, Kingsbarn closed on the Los Angeles headquarters of Skims. Newmark, one of the largest commercial real estate brokerages in the country, represented the seller. Howard Lutnick (the guy who lived next to Jeffrey Epstein and who lied about being on the island but then admitted being on the island) chaired Newmark until February 2025, when he left to become Trump’s Commerce Secretary.

Hankey Capital wrote the first mortgage on that Skims headquarters purchase. A sister company, Knight Specialty Insurance, underwrote Trump’s 175 million dollar appeal bond in the New York civil fraud case in April 2024, after other insurers would not.

None of that is illegal. None of it proves anything about Yosemite. I want to be precise, because precision is what makes this worth reading. No public record ties these transactions to the road proposal, and I am not claiming one exists.

What it shows you is proximity. The buyer of the Yosemite parcel borrows from a lender whose affiliate kept the president’s fraud judgment from coming due. The brokerage on the buyer’s other deal was chaired by a man who now sits in the president’s cabinet. That is a very small room for a decision this consequential. These guys are all buddies and this is how they get deals done. They’re counting on you not knowing what’s going on and in the end, having you look the other way.

I also want to highlight the fact that proximity is not proof. But it is the reason you demand a record. Every step of this exchange should happen in public, with documents you can read and a decision maker who signs a name to it. If the connections are meaningless, disclosure costs nothing. If they are not, disclosure is the only thing that will surface it.

Final Thoughts

This one takes five minutes and it matters.

Someone wants a private driveway through Yosemite. Maybe even a housing development and resort hotel. Read that again. A private road and development, through a national park that belongs to you, and this is probably the first time most of you are hearing about the details.

Call your senators today. Call the Department of the Interior today. Tell them to kill this deal and say it out loud in public. Not a quiet shelving. A public no, on the record, where everyone can see it.²

Then send this to the person in your life who shrugged and called it a small ask. Small asks are how public land disappears. One driveway, one swap, one waiver, and the map looks different forever.

Here is the line. No new road. No development. No land swap. No waiver. No construction. Yosemite stays public.

Make the call.

Mitch Jackson, Esq.

---

Become Part of The Uncensored Objection Substack Community

I’m guessing most people had no idea this was happening. That’s why I research and write. I put these issues in front of you before the deal is done, so you can still do something about it. That’s what Uncensored Objection is all about. Subscribe (and support if you can) and put your name behind the work that treats your rights, and your public land, like they still belong to you.

1. Donald Trump is Destroying Our Environment (digital flipbook) (pdf)

2. Department of Interior number is (202) 208-3100. Mail is Department of the Interior, 1849 C Street N.W., Washington, DC 20240. Deaf or hard of hearing, dial 7-1-1 for relay.