Bob Fry was a naturalist 38 years ago when he joined the U.S. Park Service in Yosemite Valley.
Today he’s an “interpreter.”
The title sounds like jargon, but it’s an apt word to describe Fry’s role: translating nature’s meaning to 4.1 million park visitors annually, a group increasingly composed of tenderfoots and city slickers whose idea of “camping” is a day trip in an RV.
With four decades of Yosemite National Park history behind him, Fry is poised to tell Yosemite visitors the significance of the latest major natural event — a three-day dousing in January that dumped 12 inches of rain on Yosemite Valley and closed the park for a record 2 1/2 months.
“It’s just another 20-year flood,” said Fry, 67, matter-of-factly as he told visitors of the other great floods of 1937, 1950 and 1955.
The 1997 flood drew its power from the rain and warm winds that caused the water to sheet off heavier than normal snowpacks in the High Sierras. The snowpack there remains 200 percent above normal.
In those three days the park received one third of the total precipitation it normally gets in a year, forcing the Merced River to overspill its banks.
The flood left the park with a $180 million repair bill. It also left it with about 350 fewer campsites. In addition, Yosemite Concession Services Corp., the private firm that operates Yosemite Lodge, lost about half its 495 cabins and motel rooms.
Yosemite Concession Services has been calling visitors with reservations and assisting them with alternative housing. Some canvas cabins are available at Curry Village. Hotel rooms are available 14 miles away.
The Ahwahnee, a hotel built in 1927 that manages to look rustic and elegant at the same time, emerged unscathed. The rooms cost upwards of $200 a day. The breakfast is more reasonably priced, and, unlike dinner, coats and ties are not required. Dining on raisin brioche French toast and apple pancakes with raspberry puree under the Ahwahnee’s 34-foot-tall trestle-beamed ceiling — while gazing at wildlife through the floor-to-ceiling windows — is an incongruous but worthwhile experience.
Visitors to the park’s mid-March reopening could still see pine trees reclining atop picnic tables, roots wrapped around trees, gaping holes where surging water bit into the river bank, mud stuck four feet high on bathroom walls and asphalt chunks ripped from the ground and piled like dominoes.
“It would be like going back to your home in Chicago after a bomb had gone off in it,” said Allen Lohrbach, 58, a retiree from Redwood City, Calif., who has been coming to the park every year since 1976 with his wife, Nancy, 53.
But for all the trees that have fallen, there are many more standing. And as the great naturalist and Sierra Club founder John Muir noted when he gazed upon the Yosemite Valley: “Between every two pine trees there is a doorway to a new way of life.”
Increasingly, the new way of life for visitors to Yosemite post-flood will be a life of limits.
“It’s a tug-of-war between accessibility and preservation,” Fry said. “There will be no more new trails. No more new roads. No more new hotel rooms. The flood has helped us understand the practical limits.”
Most of the campsites that were destroyed will be rebuilt in areas above the flood plain. But a master plan for the park developed in 1980 called for an 11 percent reduction in accommodations, ensuring that not all the cabins and motel rooms will be replaced.
Callers to Yosemite Lodge (209-372-1000) get a recorded message giving notice that things will be different this year:
“Thank you for calling Yosemite Concession Services Corporation . Some travel restrictions or unusual conditions exist at this time. . . . For the latest update (on park access, roads, lodging and activities), press 6.”
The Yosemite Fund, a non-profit effort started in 1985, has been funding trail repair. Now it has set up a special flood relief appeal to help pay for repairs and assist flood victims, including park employees who lost possessions or were left homeless. Donors can write the fund at P.O. Box 637, Yosemite National Park, Calif., 95389 or phone 800-469-7275.
Although bike trails were reopened this year and are only slightly bumpier than last year, the riding stables will be closed. Even if the snow-bound High Sierra camps open, the stables there may not, said concessionaire spokesman Keith Walklet.
“The snow has to melt and the trail has to be dry without doing further damage to the fragile alpine environment,” Walklet said. “The road is not open. We have to activate water and sewer systems. But we already know for a fact that bridges are out on some of the trails.”
As recently as 1995, the winter continued right up until June and the High Sierra camps never opened. On the Yosemite Valley floor, snow has fallen as late as June 15.
“The long-range weather forecast this year is for a continued warm clear dry spell,” Walklet said. “But it’s not a guarantee.”
A new — and, so far, temporary — vehicle reservation system designed to limit the park to 5,100 cars per day is scheduled to start in May for peak periods. The system will substantially reduce the number of automobiles, especially on peak days such as the 4th of July, when 9,177 cars drove into the park.
“If you are coming on July 4, I’d say leave your car at home,” said Christine Cowles, a park service spokeswoman.
Visitors with overnight accommodations at campsites or motels and those with wilderness permits won’t be required to have vehicle reservations. The cost, if any, for reservations has not been set.
But on Jan. 15 park entrance fees were quadrupled under a three-year program in which Yosemite is participating with 100 other national parks.
Car fees went up from $5 to $20. Yosemite will get to keep 80 percent of the additional $15 to pay for park improvements.
Walk-ins and bus riders will pay $10 instead of $3, an increase that Yosemite is lobbying Congress to reduce.
“If a family of four rides a bus into the park, it will cost them $40,” Cowles said. “But they could all come in a car for just $20. It doesn’t make sense when we are trying to give people an incentive to leave their cars at home.”
The goal of the Park Service, said Fry, is not to eliminate people from the park.
“The parks are for resort and recreation,” said Fry. “The parks need to be made as available as possible to all humanity. In the future, this park is going to be one of the few opportunities we will have to get away from it all. A special place like Yosemite can be preserved with just a few constraints.”
But long-time visitors like the Lohrbachs now will only come off-peak, in spring and fall.
“It’s just wall-to-wall people in summer,” Allen Lohrbach said. “You can forget about trying to ride your bike on the path — the people won’t move.”
Fry agrees the park has changed. Fewer people attend his campfire gatherings, and when they do, they barely know the words to Fry’s favorite songs.
“You know,” he said, and started singing, ” `There’s a long, long trail awinding into the land of my dreams, where the nightingale sings’ — we don’t have any nightingales,” he interjected hastily — ” `and the white moon beams . . .’ “
It’s a sign of the times, he said. People don’t want to sing. Instead they ask: “What’s the movie tonight?”
