The Trump administration has been quietly pushing the National Park Service to give a quarter-mile strip of Yosemite National Park to a private real estate developer, according to reporting published Friday by NOTUS.
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Anna Kramer’s story is built on four people directly familiar with the discussions and on agency documents NOTUS reviewed. Park Service staff in California and Washington have been working on the deal since spring 2025. The recipient would be a company that, through a layered structure of limited liability companies, is operated by Kingsbarn Realty Capital, a real estate and investment firm based in Nevada.The reason for the deal comes down to a road. In 2024, Kingsbarn bought 83 acres just outside Yosemite’s western boundary, roughly five miles from one of the park’s ancient sequoia groves. The company is marketing the property as Sanctuary at Yosemite. The problem is getting there. The nearest access road sits more than 10 miles from a park entrance, and reaching Yosemite Valley from that property currently takes about an hour and a half on a circuitous route. Kingsbarn CEO Jeff Pori wants to build a short road connecting his land directly to one of the park’s main thoroughfares.That road is what the strip of Yosemite is for. And because the park is almost entirely surrounded by national forest, it would give one private property a kind of direct access to Yosemite that essentially nothing else has.
Nobody outside the company has said what gets built on those 83 acres. NOTUS reported that it could become a hotel, a resort, or a private residence. What is clear is that without the new road, whatever goes there is 90 minutes from the part of the park people actually come to see, and with the road it is not. The structure being discussed is a land exchange rather than an outright gift, which matters for accuracy. The Park Service would give up either the land itself or an interest in it through an easement, and in return would receive land of equal value somewhere else in California. An easement is a legal right to use someone else’s property for a specific purpose, in this case a road, without owning the ground underneath it. The replacement parcel has not been identified yet, and appraising land inside Yosemite to determine what equal value even means is an extraordinarily difficult process. That difficulty is part of why this has taken more than a year.
Here is what makes it unprecedented. For 150 years the federal government has moved in one direction with the crown jewel national parks, which is to expand them. It has not carved land out of them and handed it to private companies. Yosemite is a particularly loaded place to start. The national park idea began there, with Abraham Lincoln signing the preservation of Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias in 1864, decades before the Park Service existed.
Cicely Muldoon spent 40 years with the National Park Service, five of them as Yosemite’s superintendent. She told NOTUS that the basic purpose of the national parks is to preserve these places unimpaired for future generations, and that this means not letting go of them for the purpose of private profit.
Then there is the pressure campaign. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and his department are behind the proposal, and his office has been pushing the Park Service to move faster on it. Sources described the political weight behind Kingsbarn’s proposal as unusual. One person familiar with the conversations told NOTUS that staff was being directed to be responsive to the property owner and their lobbyists and to work with them. Another said the political pressure being brought to bear is very unusual. A former Park Service official called the secrecy around the deal unprecedented.
That pressure sits directly against what Burgum said under oath. At his confirmation hearing in 2025, he told senators that his department needed to support and protect every single inch of the national parks. Trump issued a statement earlier this month pledging to protect every acre of public lands.A National Park Service spokesperson told NOTUS that no final decisions have been made on the matter, and that any decision would be subject to all applicable laws, including required environmental review and public notice. Kingsbarn did not respond to a request for comment.
Conservation groups and Democratic lawmakers began organizing against the proposal within hours of the report, calling it a betrayal of the park’s legacy.
The environmental review and public comment requirements the Park Service pointed to are real procedural steps, and they are also the only thing standing between this and a road. Those processes are where the public actually gets to weigh in, which means the window on this one is open now rather than after the documents are signed.
