Yosemite worker dies after being forced to leave her longtime home outside the park
A moment of silence for Toni Covington grew increasingly heavy as a group of her longtime neighbors huddled together at a now-closed mobile home park where they had lived days prior near Yosemite National Park.
Covington was found dead Thursday afternoon in a rented employee dorm in Yosemite Valley, just a few days after she moved in there. She was forced to leave the home she owned in the El Portal Trailer Park last week without compensation.
Covington lived in the mobile home park for over 30 years throughout a 41-year Yosemite career.
“That moment of silence got kind of tough for me. ... I’ve been to funerals and things over my life, but that was a really sad, sad one,” said Rob Schiefelbein, who had been Covington’s neighbor for decades and watched her three children grow up.
The grief was mixed with exhaustion and hurt over what has happened to all of them over the past three months. The residents learned shortly before Christmas via letters from Yosemite Superintendent Cicely Muldoon that they’d have to remove or surrender the mobile homes they own in 90 days.
Yosemite turned off power to around a dozen mobile homes in the trailer park on Tuesday, citing electrical concerns. Yosemite plans to turn the site into a campground after redoing electrical infrastructure there. Many of those affected are longtime Yosemite workers who owned their homes but leased the land beneath. El Portal residents have to work for Yosemite or its park partners to live in the rural community located just outside Yosemite’s west entrance along Highway 140 and the Merced River.
Covington was 60 years old. She first came to Yosemite at age 19, leaving behind her childhood in Ohio for a summer job at the popular national park in California. She fell in love with the place and made it her new home.
Her son Adam Covington offered to help his mom start a new life with him back in South Dakota, where he now lives, but she didn’t want to leave the Yosemite area.
“I’m going to die here before I give it up,” he recalled her telling him a week ago.
Adam said his mother was found dead in her bed during a wellness check after she didn’t show up at work. He said the Mariposa County Sheriff’s Office told him an autopsy will be conducted on Monday to determine her cause of death.
Yosemite park rangers and emergency medical providers responded to a call for assistance at housing in Yosemite at approximately 1 p.m. Thursday, where they “attempted to provide lifesaving medical care, but were unsuccessful,” said Denise Adamic, a regional spokesperson for the National Park Service. She said no additional details were available and the investigation is ongoing.
Adam Covington said his mom had some health issues “but there’s no doubt in my mind that being forced out of her home exacerbated her problems a lot.”
He said she had trouble walking up three steps leading to her mobile home, let alone a couple flights of stairs she had to climb to reach her new dorm on the third floor of an apartment complex in Yosemite Valley.
The dorm was tiny, a fraction the size of her three-bedroom mobile home, and with a shared bathroom and kitchen. There was no room for most of her belongings in that small space – or her two cats, now with new families – and she had not found a storage unit for all the many things she couldn’t take with her. The trailer park residents were recently given 30-day extensions, into April, to remove their belongings during the day, but not to live there.
No compensation or other financial help was provided by Yosemite to help them.
A GoFundMe donation account to pay for legal services for the community was established by one affected trailer park resident, and a change.org petition was created by a former El Portal resident, in hopes of garnering more support.
“She was tired,” Adam said of his mom’s final months. “She was working full-time and trying to move while getting all that stuff done there. It takes a lot out of you, and these are older people in this trailer court.”
The trailer park had been gradually closing through attrition. A past closure date in 2000 to use the site for other things was vacated due to a lack of funding, and then Yosemite reversed course in 2009 with plans to increase housing there, what was also never funded. No new deadline to leave was given until late last year, when residents were also told Yosemite planned to start constructing a campground there in 2024. Various plans for El Portal were recorded in public planning documents years ago, but without deadlines.
Yosemite is now saying the electrical system it owns in the trailer park is degraded so badly that residents need to leave before the coming fire season.
Many thought Yosemite would have given them at least a year’s notice – as is California law for converting a mobile home park – instead of 90 days.
“There’s a reason California law grants residents up to a year in advance notice, and under some circumstances, relocation benefits,” California Rural Legal Assistance attorney Mariah Thompson told The Bee for a previous story, “because mobile home park residents are tremendously vulnerable.”
Grieving the loss of a mother, neighbor and friend
Adam flew into California earlier this month to help his mom and returned home last weekend. He can’t believe he’ll be returning soon to a Yosemite without her.
NPS spokesperson Adamic shared a statement on behalf of Yosemite National Park that reads, “Our hearts go out to the family and friends of Toni Covington, a longtime Yosemite community member and employee of Yosemite Hospitality, LLC.”
Yosemite Hospitality, a subsidiary of Aramark, is Yosemite’s concessionaire, but the closure of the trailer park was driven and conducted by Yosemite National Park.
Adam received Yosemite’s condolences for the first time on Saturday during an interview with The Bee. He learned of his mother’s death from the police department in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where he lives, and said no Yosemite officials had reached out to him.
“It feels like they just don’t care,” he said of how Yosemite’s leadership carried out the trailer park closure, “that this is a problem that just needs to be taken care of, and that these aren’t people, this is a situation. And you see that a lot with their communication. They’re taking the humanity out of the whole situation, and it feels that way.”
Covington’s passing was not the only recent death among those displaced there. One resident’s dog died of a seizure earlier this week, and another longtime trailer park resident died earlier this year while receiving medical care outside the area for health issues, several residents said.
The loss of Covington’s home in El Portal and subsequent move to Yosemite Valley turned what had been a one-minute commute into a half-hour drive to work.
Covington was working at the El Portal Market, also operated by Yosemite’s concessionaire, and previously worked at Degnan’s Deli and The Ahwahnee in Yosemite Valley.
Adam described her as a great mom and the bread winner for their family growing up. She was compassionate and prideful, determined to forge her own path in life, and always willing to help the afflicted, he said.
Her youngest sister, Mary Larsen, said, “Toni was a free spirit that walked, stomped and sometimes roared through 60 years on Earth.”
To Schiefelbein, she was the “nice little old lady down the street.”
He and her other longtime neighbors in El Portal will miss having her close. Cindy Brunn called Covington “one of the best neighbors ever.”
“She’s just a good person,” Brunn said. “Good heart, good soul. Somebody you trust.”
This story was originally published March 20, 2022 at 7:47 AM with the headline "Yosemite worker dies after being forced to leave her longtime home outside the park."
