A 150-year rule of American public land is being broken by a road that isn't even very long.

"This is an attack on the American people that own this national park. It would also be unlawful and a court previously rejected a road development proposal."

— Mark Rose, Sierra Nevada program manager, National Parks Conservation Association

For more than a year, National Park Service staff have been quietly trying to do something the federal government has never done: sell a piece of a national park to a private developer. Not buy land. Not swap one forest parcel for another. Cede a quarter-mile strip of Yosemite, the park where the entire idea of protected public land was born, to a Nevada real estate firm that wants to build a road so it can develop an 83-acre plot as a village of homes and retail space.

The deal is being negotiated in the background, by appraisers and lobbyists, while the agency that is supposed to protect the park sits on the other side of the table. According to four people familiar with the discussions, as reported by NOTUS, Park Service staff in California and Washington have been holding regular meetings with representatives of Kingsbarn Realty Capital at the direction of political superiors in the Department of the Interior. One person described the atmosphere inside the agency as tense. Another put it plainly: the political pressure being brought to bear is "very unusual."

The land Kingsbarn wants access to was once called Hazel Green Ranch. Its previous owner, a developer named Lewis Geyser, spent a decade trying to get the Bush and Obama administrations to let him build the same road. He sued in 2007, lost in district court, lost again on appeal in 2012. The judges ruled he had no right to a private road through federal land.

Kingsbarn bought the ranch in 2024 for $4 million, rebranded it "Sanctuary at Yosemite," and went back to the same door with the same request. The difference now is who is answering. Under three administrations, the answer was no. Under the fourth, Park Service staff have been told to say yes, or at least to stop saying no so firmly.

The company's attorney, Lanny Davis, a former Clinton adviser whose client list has included Michael Cohen and Harvey Weinstein, frames the deal as a pro-environmental measure. The new road, he argues, would be shorter than the existing 10-mile detour, which means less driving, less exhaust. He told NOTUS he personally went to Interior and made the case. He did not disclose Kingsbarn as a client in his federal lobbying filings.

Translation: a lawyer representing a real estate firm is telling a cabinet department that a private road through a national park is, in the final analysis, a climate solution.

What makes the Yosemite deal different from ordinary land exchanges is the direction of the trade. Federal land swaps are routine, but they almost always begin with an agency wanting to acquire something: a parcel to add to a park, a wetland to protect, a corridor to restore. Here, the Park Service is the one giving up ground inside a park, in exchange for an as-yet-unspecified parcel somewhere in California. How you appraise a piece of Yosemite is an open question the agency is working through. How you appraise what that piece of land becomes after a road gives it direct access to one of the most famous valleys in the country is a question the agency is not asking.

The current superintendent of Yosemite, Ray McPadden, has been pressed to move the process along, according to two people familiar with his role. His predecessor, Cicely Muldoon, a 40-year Park Service veteran who ran Yosemite for about five years, retired shortly after the change in administration. "Our basic purpose in the national parks is to preserve these places unimpaired for future generations, not letting go of that for the purpose of private profit," she said.

The deal would also contradict things the people in charge said last year. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum testified at his confirmation hearing that "the national parks, absolutely we need to support and protect every single inch of those." In August, the president announced National Park Week with a message about protecting every acre of American lands. The Interior Department now tells the press there is "no political pressure to reach a predetermined outcome."

The developer at the center of this is worth a closer look. Jeff Pori, the CEO of Kingsbarn, has no history of national-level political giving before October 2024. Then, in the months leading up to the election, his donations to Republican committee accounts and Trump campaign PACs began appearing on a monthly rhythm. In April 2025, Kingsbarn closed on the Los Angeles headquarters of Kim Kardashian's Skims company, a deal brokered through the Newmark Group, where Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick had been chair until he divested in May, and Hankey Capital, whose chair underwrote Trump's $175 million appeal bond in the New York fraud case.

Kingsbarn's attorney says the company has had no contact with the White House. The company did not discuss the proposal with the local counties that share Yosemite's boundaries. Mariposa and Tuolumne county officials say they learned about the plan from the news.

The backlash has been swift and comes from every direction you would expect. California Governor Gavin Newsom said "Trump is hellbent on destroying everything that is sacred and beautiful about this country. California won't stand by while he grifts our public lands." Alex Honnold, the climber who free-soloed El Capitan, called the proposal "the epitome of selling the future to cash out in the present." Rep. Jared Huffman, ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee, warned that if this domino falls, every treasured park is "up for grabs."

Senator Jeff Merkley objected when the project was mentioned to Congress in a vague early-year notification that implied the Land and Water Conservation Fund would be tapped to enable the exchange. The fund's purpose, Senator Padilla said, is to acquire land to safeguard it, and "projects should be chosen on merit, not on an applicant's connections to high-ranking Trump Administration officials." The Park Service can likely proceed without further congressional involvement, which is why the fight is now expected to happen in court, the way it did in 2012.

The National Parks Conservation Association has said it will take "every and all action" to stop the deal. The federal employees union that represents rangers at Yosemite said it is "appalled."

The national park idea started in this exact valley. Abraham Lincoln signed the act that set it aside in 1864, and the Supreme Court upheld it against mining claims a decade later, on the theory that the federal government could own land in trust for the public in perpetuity. For 150 years, that arrangement went one way: the parks grew, or they held.

Now a road, seven hundred feet of it, is the price of an 83-acre development deal, and the agency that was created to keep the gate closed is being told, every few weeks, by the people above it, to open it a little further. The question was never whether this was unprecedented. The question is how many more parks it takes before anyone else thinks so.