Risk of falling boulders forces closures at Yosemite

A boulder sitting atop debris after it fell in Curry Village in California's Yosemite National Park in 2008. Some of the valley's most popular lodging areas are now off-limits.
A boulder sitting atop debris after it fell in Curry Village in California's Yosemite National Park in 2008. Some of the valley's most popular lodging areas are now off-limits. (PAUL SAKUMA / AP, File)
By Tracie Cone, Associated Press
Posted: June 15, 2012

YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK, Calif. - Falling boulders are the single biggest force shaping Yosemite Valley, one of the most popular tourist destinations in the national park system. Now swaths of some popular haunts are closing for good after geologists confirmed that unsuspecting tourists and employees were being lodged in harm's way.

On Thursday, the National Park Service announced that potential danger from the unstable 3,000-foot-tall Glacier Point, a granite promontory that for decades has provided a dramatic backdrop to park events, will leave some of the valley's most popular lodging areas permanently uninhabitable.

"There are no absolutely safe areas in Yosemite Valley," said Greg Stock, the park's first staff geologist and the primary author of a new study that assesses the potential risk to people from falling rocks in the steep-sided valley. The highest-risk area is family-friendly Curry Village, which was hit by a major rockfall several years ago.

A newly delineated "hazard zone" also outlines other areas, including the popular climbing wall El Capitan, where the danger posed by the rockfalls is high but risk of injury is low because they aren't continuously occupied.

The move to close parts of historic Curry Village, a camp of canvas and wooden cabins, comes four years after the equivalent of 570 dump trucks of boulders hit 17 cabins, flattened one, and sent schoolchildren scrambling for their lives. The park fenced off 233 of the 600 cabins in the village.

The new report, obtained early by the Associated Press, identifies 18 more that closed Thursday.

An examination by the AP after the 2008 fall found park officials were aware of U.S. Geological Survey studies dating to 1996 that show Glacier Point behind Curry Village was susceptible to rock avalanches. Yet visitors were not warned of the potential danger, and the park service repaired and reused rock-battered cabins.

Rockfalls in and around the century-old Curry Village have killed two people and injured two dozen others since 1996. Since officials began keeping track in 1857, 15 people have died throughout the valley and 85 have been injured from falling rocks.

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