Parks and Degradation: The Mess at Yosemite
August 14, 2024 at 10:46PMYosemite National Park has been considered one of the most pristine and photographic national parks in the US. But under Aramark—a private contractor that provides food and other services across schools, hospitals, and even prisons—the park’s facilities, like the once-majestic Ahwahnee Hotel, are falling apart. In this shocking piece, Laura Bliss reports on how the hospitality company fails to maintain the park and keep its employees safe.
Neglect in many forms has made Yosemite more dangerous, but chronic understaffing is the most visible problem at a glance. On the TripAdvisor page for the Ahwahnee, where visitors pay upwards of $500 a night, reviewers from the past year or so describe waiting long after check-in to get into their rooms. One expresses shock at being charged “5 star prices” for a buffet dinner of “college dining room quality.” Another compares the vibe of the once-opulent hotel to that of the withered Miss Havisham from Great Expectations. Water damage is visibly decaying the lounge’s historic frescoes, and the section where a chunk fell onto a worker is still closed off more than a year later.
“The experience is total garbage,” says Sam Kaeser, a retiree from Simi Valley who visits Yosemite with her husband multiple times a year. “The difference between what Aramark has done to the park and what the previous concessionaires have done is night and day.” At the Wawona Hotel, where the Kaesers stayed for years, she says housekeeping fell off so sharply that the couple started bringing their own cleaning supplies to deal with the bathrooms, then stopped staying on-site altogether.
Things aren’t much better elsewhere in the park. Three former employees of the Yosemite Lodge, an Aramark-run midcentury motel where reservations start around $230 a night, say managers continued to book people in rooms where workers reported bedbugs. One lodge worker who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation says they’ve seen peroxide spilled into the soil. This June, workers discovered a rat infestation in the kitchen of the Ahwahnee bar. Managers instructed an employee to spray bleach on the area without safety gear, releasing sickening fumes that caused another worker to break out in hives, according to an eyewitness.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/08/14/parks-and-degradation-the-mess-at-yosemite/
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