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For the past year, the National Park Service (NPS) has been in talks with a private corporation to negotiate a possible land deal, providing the company with a stretch of land located within Yosemite National Park.
The proposed deal, first reported by NOTUS, would benefit Kingsbarn Realty Capital, a real estate investment company, which owns 83 acres of land adjacent to the park. According to sources with knowledge of the proposal, Kingsbarn would be given the land to allow it to develop a road from its property to one of the more popular destinations in the park, a large grove of ancient sequoia trees just five miles away, to which the property doesn’t currently have easy road access.
Per the report, the Trump administration “has been looking into ways it could cede a roughly quarter-mile strip of land inside Yosemite.” The proposal also has the “full weight” of the Interior Department’s backing, which is causing friction with park staff.
“The political pressure being brought to bear is very unusual,” one source told NOTUS.
The proposal has been in the works since the spring of 2025. Notably, Interior Department Secretary Doug Burgum promised lawmakers during his confirmation hearings in January of that year that he would keep national parks intact.
“We need to support and protect every single inch of” U.S. national parks, he said at the time.
Federal rules require that land owned by the government and given to private companies must be done through exchanges of land elsewhere, and Kingsbarn would likely give away some of its land in California to the feds. But such a move has never occurred for land within a national park — indeed, national parks tend to grow in size rather than lose ground.
Even if the deal were a pure land swap, Kingsbarn could receive huge financial windfalls from it if the company built homes or hotels on its property near the park and proposed roadway.
“Obviously this looks kind of unseemly, with the value of this property potentially exploding with the deal,” a source familiar with the proposed exchange said. “It kind of smells, you know. It’s not quite right.”
Cicely Muldoon, the former superintendent of Yosemite National Park who resigned from her position just before Trump began his second term as president in 2025, panned the idea of giving away parts of Yosemite to the real estate company.
“The national park idea started in Yosemite with Abraham Lincoln’s preservation of Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias. 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,” Muldoon told NOTUS.
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