For more than a year, National Park Service staff have been working under a directive from Trump administration officials to arrange something no administration has done: convey a piece of Yosemite National Park to a private developer. NOTUS reported the effort on August 28, 2026, based on agency documents and four people directly familiar with the discussions; The Washington Post reported it the same day.
The mechanics are a land exchange. Since spring 2025, the administration has explored ceding a roughly quarter-mile strip inside Yosemite, or an easement across it, to a company operated through a web of LLCs by Kingsbarn Realty Capital, a Nevada real estate and investment firm. In return the government would receive land of equal value somewhere in California, not yet identified. Kingsbarn's CEO, Jeff Pori, wants a short road connecting an 83-acre property the company bought for $4 million in 2024, called “Sanctuary at Yosemite” in records, to one of the park's central thoroughfares. The property's existing access road is more than 10 miles from a park entrance; without the new road, guests of any resort built there would face a circuitous 90-minute drive to Yosemite Valley. The road would give the parcel private access to a park otherwise buffered almost entirely by national forest.
The Park Service has said no to this exact request for more than twenty years. The land, historically Hazel Green Ranch, belonged to developer Lewis Geyser, who pressed the Bush and Obama administrations for the same road, sued in 2007, and lost in district court and again on appeal in 2012. The courts held that while the government must provide an exit for properties enclosed by federal land, it owes no new road where an access road already exists.
What changed is pressure from the top. The proposal is backed by “the full weight of the Interior Department's top political leadership,” sources told NOTUS. One person familiar with the conversations: “They want us to be responsive to the property owner and their lobbyists.” Another: “The political pressure being brought to bear is very unusual.” Cicely Muldoon, a 40-year Park Service veteran who ran Yosemite as superintendent until retiring shortly after Trump took office: “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.”
The administration's own words cut against the deal. At his confirmation hearing, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said of the parks, “absolutely we need to support and protect every single inch of those.” On August 24, four days before the story broke, Trump's National Park Week message said, “My Administration is committed to protecting every acre of our lands.” Yosemite is where the national park idea began, with Lincoln's 1864 preservation of Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove.
The Park Service says “no final decisions have been made” and that any exchange would require environmental review and public notice. Kingsbarn did not respond to NOTUS, but after publication its attorney, Lanny Davis, confirmed the company is pursuing the exchange and argued the road is “a pro-environmental decision”: “It wasn't Donald Trump; it was me, liberal Democrat Lanny Davis, former counsel to President Clinton, went to the Department of Interior.” No land has changed hands, and the entry should be read accordingly: what is documented is an unprecedented, politically driven attempt, not a completed conveyance (see Bulldozers Enter Big Bend National Park for Border Barrier Work, in What a Former Superintendent Calls the Least Active Crossing Area in the Country and Interior Helped Write Mike Lee's Public Lands Sell-Off Pitch. Then Burgum Said Land Sales Were Not 'Part of the President's Agenda').