WSP Preliminary Concepts and Ideas: July - September 2016

Yosemite National Park initiated the Wilderness Stewardship Plan (WSP) in November 2015. At that time, the public was given the opportunity to provide general comments and to voice concerns regarding the Wilderness. The park posed two questions for the public to consider: What do you value about the way in which the National Park Service currently manages the Yosemite Wilderness?; and What are the most important issues facing the Yosemite Wilderness today, and how should they be addressed?

After reviewing the comments received from the public, the park identified four topics that have substantive effects on wilderness and wilderness management. Those topics are visitor use and capacity, stock use, trail management, and commercial services.

The park produced preliminary concepts related to the two more complex topics that were designed to direct the conversation towards productive management solutions. In July, the park released these concepts and ideas to the public. Throughout this phase, the park conducted a series of in-person meetings and web-based "webinars". The public was given the opportunity to voice their opinions and offer suggestions during the comment period, which was open from end of July to September 30th.

The comment period for the preliminary concepts is now closed. The NPS received over 850 comments from the public and other stakeholders. The NPS will be analyzing the comments, and will post the comment report as well as a full-text document, once the coding has been completed, to this website.

We will use your feedback to help us further refine the preliminary concepts and ideas, which will be presented in the Draft WSP available for public review during the summer of 2017.

Thank you to all who participated in the preliminary concepts portion of this plan, your thoughts and ideas are appreciated. Please stay tuned for future opportunities to comment on the Wilderness Stewardship Plan.

Topic Questions Instructions:

Topic Questions are optional. Please feel free to answer them accordingly. You do not need to answer every question. If you have a comment that does not fit into one of the provided questions, there is an additional space to input other feedback at the bottom of the comment page.

Topic Questions:

1. Have we identified a sufficient range of concepts to address visitor use and capacity?

2. Have we omitted any key ideas related to visitor use and capacity?

3. What do you like about the visitor use and capacity concepts?

4. Are there specific elements of the visitor use and capacity concepts that should be changed? How would you change them?

5. Have we identified a sufficient range of concepts to address stock use?

6. Have we omitted any key ideas related to stock use?

7. What do you like about the stock use concepts?

8. Are there specific elements of the stock use concepts that should be changed? How would you change them?

9. Did we omit any issues that you would like us to address in the future? How would you address that issue?

Document Content:

How to Stay Involved   (1020.9 KB, PDF file) Preliminary Concepts Overview   (684.8 KB, PDF file) Preliminary Concepts - Visitor Use and Capacity   (1.4 MB, PDF file) Preliminary Concepts - Stock Use   (1.7 MB, PDF file) Preliminary Concepts Master Presentation   (49.0 MB, PowerPoint file) Public Comment Report   (1.9 MB, PDF file) Disclaimer: Links within the above document(s) were valid as of the date published. Note: Some of the files may be in PDF format and can be viewed using the Adobe Acrobat Reader software. You may download a free copy of from Adobe Systems.