A Fired Yosemite Locksmith Messages Trump from the Summit of El Capitan

Before a visit to Yosemite National Park, it never hurts to reacquaint yourself with the hazards that can accompany its wild beauty: rockfalls, the swift currents of the Merced River, an encounter with a bear. (Never throw food at one.) A lesser, more recent concern: getting trapped in a park toilet.

Locks that jam, handles that break off, doors that stick owing to swings in temperature—these lavatory failures afforded the Yosemite Valley’s go-to locksmith, Nate Vince, a measure of job security. Or so he thought. On Valentine’s Day, Vince, a forty-two-year-old welder turned park staffer, was among a thousand National Park Service personnel who were terminated via e-mail, a shock that he shared on Instagram: “The people that fired me don’t know who I am, or what I do.” Vince does a great deal more than free tourists from rest rooms. For four years, he shadowed the previous locksmith, getting to know thousands of keys and locks in the park, from gun safes and an on-site federal courtroom to storage lockers for emergency medical supplies.

His time suddenly his own, Vince got an idea to photobomb the park’s annual “firefall” spectacle as a protest. For two weeks in late February every year, the setting sun lends the snowmelt at Horsetail Falls an orange glow, giving it the appearance of molten metal. This fleeting display draws thousands, a ready audience for what Vince had in mind—unfurling an inverted American flag.

“What’s happening is bigger than me,” Vince said by phone from the Zodiac route on the vertical granite of El Capitan, about two thousand feet above the Valley floor. Yes, he needs a new plan for his life, but he also felt a need to speak for those who now feared for their jobs. “I’d say there’s a mild hysteria right now,” he said, adding that the park rangers “have been told not to talk to the media. Now they’ve got this e-mail saying they have to justify what they did last week or it’ll amount to a silent resignation. The people who love our parks need to know what’s happening to those who care for them.”

Inverted flags, a pre-radio, even pre-Morse-code, sign of nautical distress—a visible SOS—became a popular form of protest during the Vietnam War. Last May, supporters of Donald Trump adopted the gesture when he was convicted of falsifying business records. Vince said that he saw the inverted flag as a free-speech symbol that would “disrupt without violence and draw attention to the fact that public lands in the United States are under attack.”

For the visual to register, though, the flag had to be big. Last year, when four climbers placed a banner (“STOP THE GENOCIDE”) on the monumental rock face of El Capitan, “it ended up being sort of a postage-stamp-sized thing, halfway up there,” Miranda Oakley, a Palestinian American climber who hung it with three friends, recalled. “Once people got binocs or a telephoto lens on it, then they got it.”

Vince obtained a thirty-by-fifty-foot flag from Gavin Carpenter, a Yosemite maintenance mechanic who is an Army veteran. He and Carpenter agreed that they’d observe proper flag etiquette. With mild surprise, Vince noted, “One of our climber friends didn’t know you aren’t supposed to let it touch the ground, or that you’re supposed to take it down when it’s not illuminated.”

He had no trouble finding co-conspirators. Although Yosemite rangers and rock climbers have not always been the best of friends, these days they mostly are. Rangers appreciate the annual cleanups led by climbers, and although some older climbers prefer their status as outlaws, even the cranky big-wall pirates muster for mountain rescues. One climber whom Vince tapped to help flew in from New Mexico.

On February 22nd, a crew of six rose at 4 a.m. and headed up the East Ledges, a trail that rock climbers often use to descend from El Capitan after an ascent of its face. On the summit, they used haul bags (for ropes and other gear) to weight the corners of the giant flag before rappelling over the cliff’s edge to unfurl it just off the stone. Wind and thermals—pockets of warmer air on the rise—nearly caused them to abort. Vince recalled a moment that spooked him: “I’m looking over and I see the flag billow and one of our guys floating up like Mary Poppins.”

Two golden eagles surveyed their stunt, one swooping so close that they all stopped to gape. As the sun began to set, the wind relented, and the flag draped down in full. Then, twenty minutes before last light, the team folded it up. “We’d made our point and didn’t want to interfere with people’s experience of firefall,” Vince said. “We brought it up right before the sun lasered the falls. It really had a ceremonial feel. I’ve been down there with the crowd for firefall, too, and the moment builds and everyone just cheers.” ♦