In the '60s, Disney Almost Built a Ski Resort in Sequoia National Park (original) (raw)

Today, Mineral King Valley is a remote hideaway within California’s Sequoia
National Park, accessible only by foot-trail or a winding, treacherous
automobile road. But in the 1960s this mountain paradise of snowmelt streams, white-fir
forests, and hulking granite peaks nearly became home to a massive ski resort
developed by the master of mass entertainment: Walt Disney.

In February 1965, the Forest Service issued a prospectus
inviting proposals for a ski resort in the valley, then part of Sequoia
National Forest. Six proposals answered the call, and in December 1965 the
Forest Service announced the winner: a bold plan from the company that created Disneyland.

The proposal by Walt Disney Productions (today, the Walt Disney Company) envisioned an
“American Alpine Wonderland” on the floor of Mineral King Valley: a five-story
hotel with 1,030 rooms, a movie theater, general store, pools, ice rinks,
tennis courts, and a golf course. Twenty-two lifts and gondolas would scale the
eight glacial cirques above the village, leading to ski runs four miles long
with drops of 3,700 feet.

Disney realized that ski operations alone were rarely
profitable, but visitor services would produce projected revenues of
$600 million over the resort’s first decade. Ten restaurants and cafes would
feed the hungry crowds—including a 150-seat coffee shop perched atop Eagle’s
Crest Ridge, 11,090 feet above sea level. For entertainment, Disney’s
Imagineers designed a show with singing, robotic bears that eventually became
the Country Bear Jamboree attraction at Disneyland.

An artist’s rendering of the proposed Mineral King resort. [USC Libraries – Mineral King Development Records]

The ski resort was one of several ambitious projects that Walt
Disney spearheaded in the years before his death in 1966. (Others included an
Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow—EPCOT—and the California Institute
of the Arts.) An avid skier, Disney had served as director of pageantry at the
1960 Winter Olympics in Squaw Valley, California. An earlier trip to the Swiss
Alps for the production of “Third Man on the Mountain” inspired Disney to
install a steel-and-fiberglass Matterhorn at Disneyland. Now he would build an
alpine village among real snow-capped mountains in the Sierra Nevada.

Much of the resort was to be car-free; day-use visitors and
hotel guests would park downslope in an 8-10 story garage with room for 3,600
automobiles. From there, a cog railway would transport them to the main resort
area. The Disney plan also called for extensive support
infrastructure, including water storage tanks and a sewage treatment facility.
The resort’s price tag? $35 million. (By comparison, Disneyland had cost only
$17 million in 1955.)

Wilderness activists were appalled. At the time, only 33
campsites dotted the Mineral King Valley, which attracted 24,000 annual
visitors, most of the them arriving in the summer. The Disney proposal projected annual visitation of at least one
million.

Compounding the insult was the fact that Congress had
designated Mineral King a National Game Refuge in 1926, and Sequoia National
Park bordered the area on three sides. In fact, Congress would have likely
already incorporated Mineral King into the park if not for the area’s history
as a mining district.

Cover of a 1969 government report on the proposed ski resort. [USC Libraries – Mineral King Development Records]

Diagrams from the U.S. Forest Service’s 1976 Final Environmental Statement on the Mineral King resort. [USC Libraries – Mineral King Development Records]

Mining the King

Miners discovered silver in the Mineral King area in 1872.
Within a year, prospectors scouring the rugged terrain for ore deposits had
filed dozens of claims. A boomtown of 3,000 sprang from the floor of Mineral
King Valley, and a primitive wagon road snaked its way up the mountainside from
the foothill town of Three Rivers.

But boom soon turned to bust. A series of destructive
avalanches beset the valley in 1879, and disappointing returns from the mines
gave lie to Mineral King’s name. By 1882 the mining village had all but faded
into a ghost town.

Mineral King then began attracting a new breed of
visitors—hikers, campers, horseback riders—as its flora and fauna recovered
from mining’s heavy footprint. Even more recreational visitors came after 1890,
when Congress created Sequoia National Park in an adjacent watershed, and by
the 1920s the valley was home to several clusters of summer cabins.

But when Congress enlarged the park’s boundaries in 1926, a
doctrine of “worthless lands” still governed the preservation of national
parkland—in other words, areas that could be exploited as farmland or for their
mineral resources were excluded from protection. Because might someday return
to Mineral King, Congress left the area in the hands of the Forest Service,
which largely managed public lands as economic rather than scenic or biological
resources.

The all-weather access road would have followed the path of the existing automobile road, cutting through six miles of Sequoia National Park. [USC Libraries – Mineral King Development Records]

The Sierra Club Joins

the Fray

Still, little changed about Mineral King’s primitive feel,
even after the Forest Service unsuccessfully tried to attract a ski resort
developer in 1949. Meanwhile, much of the nation had embraced a new, preservation-oriented
wilderness ethic—a change reflected in the landmark Wilderness Act of 1964. So when
the Forest Service and Disney announced their plans for the valley in 1965, activists leapt into action, led by the Sierra Club.

The ensuing legal and public relations battle is richly
documented in the USC Libraries’ Mineral King Development Records collection, the personal archive of an
environmental activist who challenged the development—and won. Jean Koch was
among an army of nature-lovers, led by the Sierra Club, who for more than ten
years petitioned federal officials, penned letters to the editors, and staged “hike-ins” to save the
solitude of “the King” from the planned resort.

At first, the battle centered on the fact that six miles of
a proposed all-weather access road would cut through Sequoia National Park,
displacing some eight million cubic yards of rock and dirt. As Disney launched
a three-year snow study and finalized its plans, the Sierra Club lobbied the
National Park Service to block the highway project. But after the park service
and its supervisor, interior secretary Stewart Udall, approved the road, the
club resorted to litigation.

On June 5, 1969, the club sued the heads of Sequoia National
Park and Sequoia National Forest and the interior and agriculture secretaries
in federal court, arguing that the project improperly handed control of too
much national forest land to Disney and that the highway through the national
park was illegal. A trial judge issued a preliminary injunction, halting work
until the case reached the Supreme Court.

The high court struck the Sierra Club a blow on April 19,
1972, when it ruled against the organization on procedural grounds in Sierra Club v. Morton. In a 4-3
decision, the court held that the organization—founded by John Muir in 1892—lacked
standing to sue because it had not shown how the proposed ski resort would
injure any individuals, as opposed to the collective interests of the club’s
membership.

Activists staged “hike-ins” and marches on Disneyland to protest the planned Mineral King resort. [USC Libraries – Mineral King Development Records]

The Controversy

Fizzles

Even as the Supreme Court handed Disney and the Forest
Service a victory, another legal obstacle stalled construction. On January 1,
1970, President Richard Nixon had signed the National Environmental Policy Act,
which required federal agencies to study the environmental effects of proposed
actions in detail. As the Sierra Club amended its lawsuit to conform to the
Supreme Court’s standing doctrine, the Forest Service prepared several drafts
of its environmental impact statement. It released the final 285-page
tome (nearly 600 pages, including appendices) in February 1976.

By then, Disney’s proposal was more than a decade old, and
the company’s executive leadership—along with skiing enthusiasts and many in
government—had lost interest in Mineral King.

Congress finally killed the project with the National Parks
and Recreation Act of 1978. With President Carter’s signature on November 10,
1978, the Mineral King area became part of Sequoia National Park. Today, Mineral
King Valley is still accessible by the old mining-era wagon path—now a one-lane
automobile road—but most of the land once destined to become a mountain
Disneyland is now federally designated wilderness.

For the Sierra Club, the Mineral King controversy marked a turning point for a group founded in 1892 with two stated purposes: “exploring, enjoying, and rendering accessible the
mountain regions of the Pacific Coast” and “preserving the forests and other
features of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.” Over time, the growth of automobile
tourism in national parks and battles over dams in Yosemite’s Hetch Hetchy
Valley and Colorado’s Echo Park showed that those two purposes weren’t
necessarily compatible.

The club’s priorities shifted accordingly. When the Forest
Service first proposed a ski resort in Mineral King in 1949, the club pledged
its support. In 1965, the club’s national board of directors had reversed its
stance—but only by a split vote of seven to four. By the end of the Mineral
King war, however, the club had firmly established its activist credentials.
The Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund, founded in 1971 to fight the Mineral King
resort in court, lives on today as Earthjustice.

For Disney, Mineral King was not only the company’s first
public controversy but also one that tarnished its nature-friendly reputation,
built on its successful True Life Adventures franchise of nature films. Before
the Mineral King war broke out, Walt Disney Productions had earned 37 awards
for its work with nature conservation, and the Sierra Club made Walt Disney
himself an honorary life member in 1955.

The company continued the fight at the expense of its public
image. Disney himself might not have made the same decision. In 1969, a company
executive admitted to the Los Angeles
Times that if Disney were still alive at the time, he likely would have
pulled out in deference to environmentalists’ concerns.

A 1971 review of the controversy in Ramparts magazine—accompanied by illustrations of a
sinister-looking mouse—summed up the damage done to the company’s image of
environmental friendliness. “The beautiful old nature films of the ’50s are the
illusion; the reality is the determination to use all the corporation’s
considerable good will and political clout to take over via the U.S. Forest
Service at Mineral King,” Ramparts’ Roger
Rapoport concluded. “It is the end to all our childhood fantasies: Mickey Mouse
and Smokey the Bear conspiring to tear up the wilderness.”

The Mineral King controversy left Walt Disney Productions with a public-relations black eye. This illustration by Gene Holtan appeared in the November 1971 issue of Ramparts. [USC Libraries – Mineral King Development Records]

Top: Artist’s rendering of the Mineral King ski village. [USC Libraries – Mineral King Development Records]

Southland is made possible by a partnership between Gizmodo, the USC Libraries, and the member collections of L.A. as Subject. Written by Nathan Masters, the series explores the urban past of Los Angeles, including the lost landscapes and forgotten infrastructures that continue to influence the city we know today.