Thread: Yosemite Seeks Better Access for Ethnic Groups and Disabled

http://www.sacbee.com/content/news/s...15065704c.html

Yosemite reaches out to all
Park seeks better access for disabled and ethnic groups.
By Michael Doyle -- Bee Washington Bureau
Published 2:15 am PDT Thursday, April 27, 2006
Story appeared on Page A3 of The Bee

WASHINGTON - Three months on crutches opened Mike Tollefson's eyes last year to what's accessible and what's not at his beloved Yosemite National Park.
Doors become heavy. Steps are prohibitively steep. The world narrows, and even a longtime National Park Service manager like Tollefson learns vividly how much unfinished business remains in making parks accessible.


"It may have fallen off our radar screen a little bit," Tollefson, Yosemite's superintendent, acknowledged Wednesday while visiting Capitol Hill.
Tollefson's ankle has now recovered from his volleyball injury, and Yosemite officials are making amends for past shortfalls with an unusually ambitious $3.5 million program of upgrades planned for the coming year. Funded through park entrance and concession fees, the program will pay for everything from ramps to new lights.

"You can imagine that, with facilities as old as ours, they need to be gone over from top to bottom," Yosemite Deputy Superintendent Kevin Cann said.

But at California's most popular national parks, accessibility now means much more than simply lowering barriers to the disabled.

At Yosemite, Sequoia and Kings Canyon, managers are aggressively trying to reach the Central Valley's sizable and growing minority population. Accessibility, it turns out, is a coat of many colors.

For park managers, opening doors isn't just the right thing to do.

Politically, it's the smart move. Today's young Latino and Southeast Asian visitors are tomorrow's voters, who will be electing the representatives who make decisions about where the government should spend money.

"If we don't reflect what California looks like, we're going to lose that support," Cann said.

Today, a gathering of 40 second-graders at Kings Canyon National Park shows how this is working.

The students from Reedley's Lincoln Elementary School will be helping dedicate the park's newly renovated visitors center at Grant Grove. Outwardly, the building remains much the same. Inside, the exhibits have been completely redone - and, in what is apparently a first for the National Park Service, all are bilingual in English and Spanish.

"It's actually very cool," Kings Canyon spokeswoman Alexandra Picavet said.

Picavet described the visitor center remodeling as "a piece of a much bigger" effort that's reshaping how the park presents itself to valley residents. Rangers are now giving Spanish-language programs, and several campsites have been redesigned to accommodate larger, expanded families.

At Yosemite, likewise, rangers introduced headsets offering Mariposa Grove tour information in six languages. This isn't cheap. The multilingual headsets cost tens of thousands of dollars, Tollefson noted, and he's now hoping to add Chinese and perhaps another language to the six already offered.

"The question is, who do we need to capture?" Tollefson said, shortly after a hallway meeting with Rep. George Radanovich, R-Mariposa.

Tollefson was referring to ethnic groups. A study of about 780 Yosemite visitor groups last summer determined that 8 percent were Latino, 10 percent were Asian and 88 percent were Caucasian. That probably understates the real minority visitor population, Tollefson noted.

Sequoia and Kings Canyon officials, for instance, estimate that about 20 to 25 percent of summer visitors are Latinos from the Central Valley, while an estimated 80 percent of the parks' winter visitors are thought to be Latino.

Ten percent of the Yosemite visitor groups surveyed included at least one member with a disability.

Because Radanovich's district includes Yosemite, he is one individual the park needs to capture politically. Another is a former Air Force pilot named Steve Pearce, a Republican who represents a 47 percent Latino congressional district in New Mexico. Pearce chairs the House national parks, recreation and public lands subcommittee.

Last week, Pearce and two aides traveled through Yosemite, Sequoia and Kings Canyon to check out how the parks are handling accessibility issues. He came away impressed. The California parks, Pearce said Wednesday, exceeded his expectations.

"You all are doing a better job than the rest of the country," Pearce said.


About the writer:
The Bee's Michael Doyle can be reached at (202) 383-0006 or mdoyle@mcclatchydc.com.

Park seeks better access for disabled and ethnic groups.

Let's see.

It costs $20 to get into Yosemite legally.

Are they going to create an open border zone so the illegals can break in for free and feel right at home?

Doesnt the United Nations run this park?