A wrapped vehicle in Mineral King Valley, where marmots target radiator hoses and wiring. Photo: National Park Service.
Vehicles parked in Mineral King Valley face a real risk from marmots chewing through radiator hoses, belts, and wiring, park officials say.
Mineral King is a high alpine valley in Sequoia National Park reached by a narrow, dead-end mountain road, and it's the specific area where the National Park Service runs its marmot advisory. The current guidance is straightforward. Drive over a tarp before parking, then wrap it around the entire vehicle, wheel wells included. Chicken wire, the old standby, no longer works. Marmots have learned to get around it.
The animals target radiator hoses, belts, wiring, and insulation, and a determined marmot can disable a car outright. Some have climbed into an engine bay and ridden along undetected, turning up as far away as Southern California before anyone realized they had a stowaway.
NPS also recommends washing a vehicle's undercarriage and engine bay before a trip into Mineral King, and checking hoses, belts, and wiring for chew marks before starting the engine on the way out. Only non-toxic deterrents are allowed. Poison is banned outright.
None of this is new. NPS has run a marmot advisory for the valley for years, and the tarp method predates this week's headlines. What's changed is the method, and what's driving fresh attention is a viral news report about marmots menacing hikers around the same trailheads. For a driver on a narrow mountain road with no cell service, the stakes aren't funny. A chewed hose can mean an expensive tow with no signal to call for help.
The renewed attention traces to a Wall Street Journal video and article by reporter Jim Carlton, published Aug. 30, that turned a handful of hikers' encounters into a viral moment days later.
Andrew Reinhart, a 28-year-old engineer from Livermore, California, told the Journal he woke from a nap on a Mineral King hike to find a marmot's tongue in his ear. "It scared the s*** out of me," he said. "You don't expect to get licked when you go to sleep in the woods."
A marmot got away with one of Jeff Weit's shoes on an earlier trip, and he found it later, stashed under a log. The 66-year-old from Atascadero, California, ties his shoes together at camp now. "You have to treat your shoes like bear food," he said.
"I heard this almost war cry," Nitin Gupta said, describing the sound a marmot made when his girlfriend tried to take back his stolen hiking pole. The 31-year-old San Francisco founder let the animal keep it.
The vehicle damage is the more expensive version of the same problem. One hiker's car was disabled after a marmot chewed into it near Mineral King, and he paid more than $1,000 to have it towed down the valley's narrow, 23-mile access road, according to the Journal's reporting. Eileen Vasko, a server at the Silver City Mountain Resort near the trailhead, described what the parking lot looks like in peak season. "It looks like a parking lot full of giant Christmas presents," she said.
NPS posts a sign at the entrance to the valley, elevation roughly 7,800 feet: "You are entering Marmot Country."
Dan Blumstein, a UCLA ecologist who chairs the university's Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and has studied yellow-bellied marmot behavior for decades, told the paper the animals are drawn to salt left behind by sweat on backpack straps and hiking poles, and to the fluids and materials around a parked car.
A different explanation comes from Andrew Collins, The Drive's executive editor, who thinks the long, high-load climb into the parks strains a cooling system enough to cause small leaks or overflow seepage that a car parked around town wouldn't have. He's careful to call it a hypothesis, not a finding, and no mechanic, engineer, or park biologist has confirmed the mechanism.
The smell of coolant appeals to more than marmots. Dogs are drawn to it too, and swallowing ethylene glycol causes rapid kidney failure and death in either animal.
The park and the Park Service aren't responsible for what a marmot does to a parked car, and the tarp isn't guaranteed to stop one. It's just cheaper than the tow.
How we reported this
This article draws on the following primary sources, accessed Aug. 31 through Sept. 1, 2026:
- National Park Service, Sequoia & Kings Canyon National Parks, nps.gov/seki/planyourvisit/marmots.htm, the parks' official vehicle-protection advisory, last updated Sept. 26, 2023. The current authority on the tarp method, the retirement of chicken wire, the no-poison rule, and the season and location details.
- The Wall Street Journal, reported by Jim Carlton and published Aug. 30, 2026 as "Marmots Are Terrorizing California Hikers and Stealing Their Shoes." Accessed via tovima.com's republication of the piece, since wsj.com was not directly reachable. The named hikers, the UCLA researcher's quote, and the tow-bill and parking-lot details all originate in this reporting.
- The Drive, thedrive.com, by Andrew P. Collins, published Aug. 31, 2026. The piece that first flagged this week's renewed attention for a vehicle-focused audience, and the source for the coolant-smell explanation and Collins's own labeled hypothesis about why the parks see this problem specifically.
- AccuWeather and Unofficial Networks corroborated the 2026 protocol update (tarp and wheel wells over chicken wire) and the tow-bill figure with independent coverage of the same guidance.