Amid ‘God’s Watercolor’ and a Bear, Yosemite Court’s in Session

Occasionally, when Judge Helena Barch-Kuchta holds a Zoom meeting in her chambers, a black bear will appear in the background of her screen, rooting around for pine nuts outside the windows of her office.

“Is that a bear?”

“Oh, yes, it is.”

Barch-Kuchta even has a nickname for the wild animal: “Barrister the Bear.”

Bobcats and deer are also a common sighting around Barch-Kuchta’s chambers, which are tucked away in a quiet corner of California’s Yosemite Valley inside one of America’s crown jewel national parks and among the most visited in the country.

The small federal courthouse is surrounded by 2,000-foot granite walls inside a bustling, city-like valley of lodges, campsites, visitor centers, and cafeterias. In the springtime, as the snow in the high Sierra Nevada mountains melts, the nearly 2,500-foot Yosemite Falls can be seen roaring high above the court.

Barch-Kuchta, a magistrate judge for the US District Court of the Eastern District of California, is one of two judges who holds court inside a national park. The other is in Yellowstone.

The Yosemite judge, nearing five years on the job, is the latest in a long line of jurists who have occupied one of the most spectacular judicial seats in the country.

Congress established the position in 1920, recognizing that the country’s third oldest national park would become a hotbed for tourism. With that comes misconduct, ranging from drunk driving and speeding to illicit drug use and illegal poaching.

The park is owned and run by the federal government, so crimes committed on the land, even misdemeanors, are prosecuted under federal law.

Although Yosemite Valley can receive many millions of visitors each year and houses hundreds of residents, including the judge herself, the court is hours away from the nearest urban center in Fresno, Calif. Cell service in the Valley can be spotty, and winter storms and wildfires can shut down the park entirely.

Barch-Kuchta accepts that as part of living in a treasured park.

“The beauty of this place is, I think, beyond words,” Barch-Kuchta said in an interview in her chambers. “It’s like God’s watercolor painting, it’s just absolutely breathtaking.”

Living in a National Park

Administering justice inside a national park requires a combination of experience, skills, and a bit of outdoorsman grit that most federal judges don’t need to think about.

“The challenge with this position has always been to find somebody who is not only a legal fit for the job but has some knowledge of what it means to live in a national park,” said Magistrate Judge Jeremy Peterson, who occupied the Yosemite seat from 2018 to 2020.

Barch-Kuchta grew up in a small town outside Pittsburgh spending her childhood camping in the Allegheny Mountains where she learned how to cook over an open fire. Her mother, a nurse, was involved with Camp Fire Girls of America, an organization focused on connecting youth with the outdoors, and Barch-Kuchta would spend her summers at rural camps in Pennsylvania.

After graduating from Penn State University in 1983, she and a friend took long road trip across the country to see the national parks, with stops including Yellowstone, Sequoia, and Yosemite.

Barch-Kuchta knew after graduating that she wanted to attend law school but arriving in Yosemite Valley for the first time during that trip she had no idea that practicing law in the park was a possibility. “We were just interested in looking for bears and waterfalls,” she said.

She graduated from Duquesne University School of Law in Pittsburgh in 1990, worked in private practice for a number of years, and later as a staff attorney for a federal court in Florida as well as in the Department of Justice’s foreign litigation office in London.

When she returned to the states, she saw the job opening for the Yosemite judge position and thought of a childhood spent camping and hiking in the woods, experiences that would come in handy.

Federal magistrate judges are appointed, but not Senate confirmed. Barch-Kuchta applied and was hired in November 2020.

In the winter of 2023, California saw one of its biggest snow years in decades, enough to shut down the park for weeks. Barch-Kuchta found herself trapped in the courthouse one night after she discovered that four feet of snow had piled up outside while she was working. She decided to sleep in the court that night, and the next afternoon she dug herself a path back to her house with a snow shovel.

“No one was coming to plow up that road,” she recalled.

Peterson, Barch-Kuchta’s predecessor, arrived in the position in 2018 with a similar career trajectory working in a series of both public sector and private practices jobs. And like Barch-Kuchta, Peterson grew up spending time camping and recreating outdoors.

The Michigan native spent childhood summers living in a cabin in one of the country’s most remote national parks, Isle Royale, a small island located in Lake Superior, where his father studied wolf populations.

Peterson went on to do stints as a volunteer and ranger in other parks including Yellowstone, Kenai Fjords National Park in Alaska, and in Central Park in New York City before attending law school.

Magistrate Judge Donald Pitts, one of the park’s longest tenured judges who served 18 years until his retirement in 1993, spent three seasons working as a smokejumper, a firefighter who parachutes into remote wildfires, before attending law school. He died in 2014.

A Changing Park

In 1984, Pitts made a plea to federal court administrators in Washington, DC, to construct a new courthouse to help manage the booming tourism destination, one that has consistently seen millions of annual visitors since the 1970s.

The courthouse at the time consisted of only two rooms connected by a public hallway with little private space for the judge or attorneys. “The Courthouse is so small that people entering or leaving disturb the Court procedures,” Pitts wrote in a letter to court administrators.

The federal judiciary agreed to build a new courthouse, which contains ample seating, a jury box, and office rooms for the judge and staff. Court security officers, dressed in standard navy-blue blazers, scan attendees through a metal detector.

During Pitts’ time, Yosemite Valley was much more akin to a small city, with a local dentist, a barbershop, and a high school for the children of park residents. The park even operated its own jail cell.

“You would sentence somebody to jail, and they would do their time here in the Yosemite jail, right in the valley,” Barch-Kuchta said.

Many of the park’s previous concessionaires had operated for decades at a time, and there were far more multi-generational families in the park.

But over the decades, the composition of the valley’s population has changed. In 1997, a major flood significantly damaged the park’s housing stock. These days, most of the park’s residents are seasonal employees for Aramark, the concessionaire that runs hospitality services in a number of parks around the country.

Those sentenced to jail now do their time outside the park.

Barch-Kuchta and Peterson said the park can be a lonely place at times. As judges, they must refrain from spending too much time socializing with park rangers who may be involved in the cases they hear.

“It’s a tough relationship because you have to watch that you don’t cross that line and that you maintain your independence,” Barch-Kuchta said. “That person might come before you and testify.”

For Peterson, who had two kids nearing high school age during his tenure, the shrinking community of families was ultimately a deal breaker. The valley has a school that runs through sixth grade, but the closest high school is up to an hour and a half drive outside the park. “It’s probably too far for a high schooler to be commuting back and forth,” he said. “That would really interrupt their ability to make friends in school.”

A magistrate judge position happened to open in Sacramento, and he transferred to that station in 2020.

Barch-Kuchta’s children had already grown up and left home by the time she applied for the job. She lives in the park with her husband.

Illicit BASE Jumpers

As a magistrate judge, Barch-Kuchta only has jurisdiction to hear certain kinds of misdemeanor cases and can only sentence defendants to up to one year in prison.

More serious felony crimes, which do occasionally happen in the park, are transferred to the Fresno courthouse where a district judge will oversee the case.

The misdemeanor cases run the gambit of crimes that in most places would go to a state court judge. The offenses often stem from park visitors under the influence of alcohol and drugs, and sometimes involve fights, petty theft, or driving violations.

The court also often sees cases involving BASE jumping, an extreme sport where parachutists jump from the thousand-foot cliffs found all over the park. The National Park Service has long prohibited BASE jumping within park bounds and the jumpers face frequent run-ins with rangers. A new legal battle over the ban is now taking place in federal court.

The criminal docket grows significantly during the summer months when the park is most crowded.

A series of federal public defenders from Fresno will rotate through the Yosemite court as the caseloads build up. On the other side of the aisle is usually a park ranger with legal training who is charging the case, not a federal prosecutor.

John Balazs, who was an assistant federal defender in the park in the 1990s, said the position was highly sought after because of the beautiful setting. But in practice, it was hard work.

“At the end of the day, you could go take a hike. There was a little pathway from the courthouse, and you could go see the waterfalls,” he said. “But pretty soon it became a job. You get tired at the end of the day and have to drive back and forth from Fresno.”

Defendants charged with certain federal misdemeanors don’t have a right to a jury trial, so Barch-Kuchta will try cases herself, requiring the parties to return to the park and present witnesses and evidence. The judge said that in theory a case could go to a jury trial in the park courthouse, but “you would never be able to have a well represented jury” given the small and homogeneous community.

Many of the crimes committed in the park might be petty, but the goal of the national parks is to protect the wild landscape for future generations to enjoy, Barch-Kuchta said.

“We have on average 12 to 13 bears every year that are killed by speeders,” she said. “This is the home for the ravens and the bobcats, this is their home, we’re the visitors. That’s why these things matter.”