The letter from Yosemite Postmaster Fred C. Alexander, dated June 29, 1926, was meant to set the record straight regarding a shipment of 50 pounds of frankfurters from San Francisco.
The sausages were to have passed through the newly built Yosemite National Park post office before being delivered to a beloved Yosemite Valley restaurateur. Alas, the hot dogs didn’t fare so well.
A U.S. Postal Service truck had slid 50 feet down an embankment, and the “box containing the frankfurters was bursted open and the contents strewn considerably,” Alexander wrote to a U.S. Postal Service official in San Francisco.
“We gathered them up to the best of our ability, trying to save them all,” the letter continued, “but as they were pretty badly mangled and terribly dirty by the time we got them to this office it was decided that the only thing to do with them was to destroy.”
Delivery to the remote Yosemite National Park post office — as evidenced by what current Yosemite Postmaster Ellen Damin calls “the great frankfurter debacle” — has never been easy. But for the 1,800 or so residents of the Yosemite Valley, “it’s our connection to the world outside,” Damin said.
The Postal Service this month celebrated the 100th anniversary of its building in Yosemite Village. Completed in 1925, the two-story facility — with wood shingle siding on top and stone siding on bottom — was designed by Gilbert Stanley Underwood, the architect who would later design the famed Ahwahnee Hotel down the street.
The Postal Service has, for years, considered closing or consolidating rural post offices, which are expensive for the financially strapped agency to run. But in far-flung places such as Yosemite — with spotty internet and cell service, no instant Amazon delivery as well as few brick-and-mortar stores and pharmacies — they are a lifeline.
“I know how important this post office is to daily life, especially here in the Yosemite Valley,” Damin told the crowd at a centennial celebration this month.
She added: “In the mail is where a lot of everyday supplies arrive for those living here. The hikers on the Pacific Crest and John Muir trails, the climbers camping on the side of El Capitan — resupply parcels are crucial for them to continue their journeys.”
The Yosemite centennial has been a bright spot during a challenging time for both the USPS and the National Park Service. In recent months, President Trump has mused about privatizing the Postal Service, which lost $9.5 billion in the 2024 fiscal year and is cutting thousands of jobs.
On March 13, former U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy wrote in a letter to several members of Congress that the Postal Service would eliminate 10,000 positions within 30 days through a voluntary early retirement program and that it had eliminated about 30,000 positions since 2021. The letter said he had signed an agreement with the General Services Administration and members of President Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, which is led by billionaire Elon Musk, to identify further cost savings.
DeJoy resigned March 24.
This month, the Postal Service’s Board of Governors announced its selection of David Steiner to be the next postmaster general. Steiner serves on the board of FedEx, a direct USPS competitor. Critics, including the National Assn. of Letter Carriers, the union representing some 295,000 mail carriers, said they feared his selection would hasten privatization of the independent agency.
And this year, thousands of year-round and seasonal National Parks workers — including rangers, wildlife researchers and maintenance staff — have been fired and rehired as part of the DOGE efforts to slash the size of the federal government. Hundreds of year-round employees have taken buyouts.
In February, a group of Yosemite National Park staffers hung a giant, upside-down American flag — a symbol of distress — from the side of El Capitan, a 3,000-foot granite monolith, to protest the cuts.
In her May 14 centennial speech, Damin promised that, under the USPS Delivering for America plan — a 10-year modernization and cost-cutting initiative rolled out in 2021— she would remain “committed to ensuring that our service is timely, reliable and rooted in respect for the people we serve.”
Mail service to Yosemite started long before the current building was constructed. It began in August 1869, two decades before Yosemite National Park was established.
The first post office was called Yo Semite. Two words.
In the mid-to-late 1800s, mail delivery from the East Coast to the new state of California required an arduous, weeks-long journey, said Steve Kochersperger, the official historian for the USPS.
There was an overland route from St. Louis and Memphis, Tenn., to San Francisco that required a roughly 22-day journey by horse-drawn stagecoach. And there was a sea route. Steamships laden with mail sailed from the East Coast to Panama, where the mail was taken off the ships, transported in canoes or on pack animals, and handed to another steamship waiting on the Pacific side of the isthmus. That ship would then sail for San Francisco.
From San Francisco, Kochersperger said, it was still a long, difficult postal route to Yosemite before railroad service reached the park. Boats traveled by river from the Bay Area to Sacramento, where packages were handed off to a train bound for Merced. From there, it was hauled by stagecoach to the Sierra Nevada foothills town of Coulterville, where horse riders grabbed it for the last 55-mile leg of the journey.
“If you’re going to be part of the nation, you have to be connected,” Kochersperger said of mail delivery to California, which became a state in 1850. “The only connection was the mail. There was no telephone. The telegraph came later.
“Everybody in the country, no matter where they live, is important to the Postal Service, because it’s our mission to make sure they receive the same level of service as everybody else — it doesn’t matter how remote your home is,” Kochersperger said.
In 1959, John Reynolds was born at what was then called Lewis Memorial Hospital, about 200 yards from the Yosemite post office. He joked that he “didn’t go very far in my growing up and my career” — and meant it literally.
Reynolds retired as postmaster of the Yosemite post office in 2023 after a 44-year USPS career in and near the national park. Without the place, he said, he wouldn’t even be alive.
It’s where his parents, Anna and Albert, met. And it’s where his mother spent a four-decade USPS career that overlapped his own.
In 1945, Anna Reynolds, nee Aulick, then 18, hitched a ride with an aunt and uncle from her family’s home in rural Kentucky to San Francisco, where they lived. A year later, at the suggestion of a girlfriend, she took a semester off from school, headed for Yosemite and never looked back.
She soon was hired by fellow Kentuckian and Postmaster Fred C. Alexander of the frankfurter debacle. Anna Aulick was working the clerk’s window in the late 1950s when she met Albert Reynolds, a Standard Oil concessionaire from Montreal. They hit it off.
“Oh, the romances that have bloomed at that post office — that I know of! It’s quite astonishing,” said John Reynolds, 65, with a laugh.
He started working at the post office in 1978 as a part-time summer clerk and worked his way up through the ranks. He prided himself on getting the mail delivered in all conditions, including snow, floods, and rock slides, because “people feel isolated if they can’t get their mail.”
On several occasions, John Reynolds said, he drove his personal truck right up to the edge of a rockslide, walked across, and grabbed incoming mail from a USPS truck waiting on the other side.
“It was like a bucket brigade: a truck on one side, a truck on the other,” he said. “And we would walk across — to a certain amount of danger and a heightened consciousness of rocks coming down — and hand mail across the rocks.”
During the centennial celebration, John Reynolds quoted his mom, who never stopped feeling lucky to work at the Yosemite post office.
When he was a young child, he said, she posed a question: “Could you imagine if these walls could talk? … If you think about it, all the people from every state of the union, every corner of that globe, came to this post office.”
Damin, who became postmaster after John Reynolds’ retirement, also said that “without Yosemite or the post office, I would not be here.” In June 1957, her mother, Lucy Persons, went camping in the park with a few college girlfriends. They spotted a group of cute guys pitching a tent nearby.
“My mom called dibs,” Damin, 54, said with a laugh. “She called dibs on my dad. All the girls picked one from the campsite, and they went and met. My mom and dad, they stuck. Nobody else did.”
Lucy and her catch, David Persons, went back to school — she to an all-girls Catholic college in Oakland, he to school in Reno then to mortuary training in San Francisco.
Their entire courtship was through letters.
Damin comes from a long line of USPS employees. Her grandfather was postmaster in Lake Nebagamon, Wis., in the 1930s. And her grandmother, father and uncle worked as clerks. She has worked for the USPS for 24 years, starting as a substitute rural carrier in Stanislaus County. When she landed the job in Yosemite, she said, she couldn’t believe her luck.
“It’s very joyful here, and of course beautiful,” she said. “This place is magical.”
The post office staff has shrunk over the years, from five or six clerks to just two, who live in apartments above the lobby.
But the place still gets busy. And, she said, she hopes it’s around for another hundred years or more.
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