| This week we're taking a look back at some of Businessweek's most popular stories from 2024. Chemical spills, a ceiling collapse, indoor bears: Those were just some of the problems at Yosemite National Park that Laura Bliss wrote about in August. Employees and park superfans place the blame with a contracted hospitality company. The story starts with one worker who became quite ill.  Photographer: Wesley Allsbrook for Bloomberg Businessweek A couple of miles past the western entrance to Yosemite National Park, visitors pass from California into a postcard. The road opens to a majestic view of Half Dome, El Capitan and Cathedral Rocks—celebrity peaks if ever there were—which form the towering walls of Yosemite Valley. On the pine-scented floor of John Muir's mountain mansion, the Merced River flows gently by the side of the road as signs point toward trailheads and tourist destinations. Not far from Curry Village, a cluster of tent cabins and eateries at the eastern end of the road, is a section of employee housing known as the Stables. It was there that Erin Rau found herself wrapped in a sleeping bag one broiling afternoon last summer, wondering whether she was about to die. Rau was a little over a month into a seasonal job selling goods in the village's general store. Almost as soon as she arrived from Michigan, she recalls, she got the sense this wouldn't be the carefree, post-college summer gig she'd imagined. In the evenings, she was left alone to manage a bunch of fellow early-twentysomethings making the same sixteenish bucks an hour until the shop closed at 10. At night a family of ringtail possums would crawl down from the rafters to tear into a display of baked goods, a long-standing issue she says her bosses did nothing to resolve, apart from throwing away half-eaten muffins in the morning. Similarly, deer mice kept leaving droppings on the pillows and sheets in the cabin Rau shared with three other women. When one of her roommates complained, she says, management supplied a Ziploc with a couple of mouse traps, a mask, gloves and some hand wipes, leaving the employees to sort out the rest. Then, one morning, Rau awoke with what felt like the worst flu of her life. For days she huddled in bed with the heater cranked up as waves of nausea rippled down her freezing, aching body. On the third night, one of her roommates insisted on driving her the hour and a half to the nearest emergency room, in Mariposa. "I thought I was dying," Rau says. "I was shaking uncontrollably, I was so cold." The ER doctor told her that, based on her symptoms, she most likely had hantavirus, a rare disease that can attack the heart or kidneys with stunning ferocity. It kills more than 1 in 3 people. And it's transmitted by, you guessed it, deer mice. Keep reading: Yosemite National Park Is a Mess |
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