The Yosemite National Park Stamp

Where Yosemite is

Yosemite, for people who count parks

June 30, 1864. Lincoln signs the Yosemite Grant Act, handing Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Big Tree Grove to California to be held for public use and to be inalienable for all time. It is the first time the federal government set land aside specifically for preservation. It did not create a national park, because the land went to a state. It created the country's first state park, and the argument that made every later park possible.

Yellowstone got the title in 1872 for a mundane reason: Wyoming was still a territory, so there was no state to hand it to and the land stayed federal.

Yosemite became a national park on October 1, 1890, after John Muir and the editor Robert Underwood Johnson ran a magazine campaign for it. But the 1890 park was the high country around the valley. The valley floor and the sequoia grove were still California's. For sixteen years Yosemite was a national park with a state park sitting in the middle of it, and the state was managing it badly. California gave them back in 1906 and Roosevelt signed the acceptance.

The camping trip that fixed it. In May 1903 Muir took Roosevelt into the park for three nights, largely without the presidential entourage. They slept under the Grizzly Giant in the Mariposa Grove, then near Glacier Point on about five feet of snow, where it snowed on them overnight. Roosevelt's reaction, recorded at the time: "This is bullier yet." Muir said afterward that he had stuffed him pretty well regarding the timber thieves.

Half Dome's other half was never there. The name has convinced generations of visitors that something sheared it in two. Geologists estimate as much as 80% of the "missing" half is still standing. The northwest face is a cliff because a set of near-vertical cracks happened to run through the rock there and ice plucked along them. From Washburn Point it does not read as half a dome at all, but as a thin ridge. And the glaciers never went over the top of it, so no glacier could have taken anything.

Official Yosemite park site (nps.gov)

What lives in Yosemite

Black bears, and one of the best conservation-management numbers anywhere. In 1998 the park logged about 1,600 human-bear incidents and $660,000 in property damage, much of it bears tearing open parked cars. In 2015 it logged 76 incidents and $4,909. That is a 95% drop in incidents and a 99% drop in damage. It took bear-proof lockers at every campsite and trailhead, mandatory canisters in the backcountry, GPS collars, an education campaign, and about half a million dollars a year. Improper food storage can cost you a $5,000 fine and your car being impounded.

Great gray owls, and 65% of California's are here. The whole state holds only an estimated 200 to 300. In 2010 genetic work showed Yosemite's birds are a distinct subspecies, isolated at the southern edge of the species' range. North America's tallest owl, up to two feet with a five-foot wingspan, hunting the edges where forest meets meadow.

Sierra Nevada bighorn sheep, and this one is not a success story yet. Listed endangered in 2000 when about 100 animals remained in the entire subspecies. They had been gone from Yosemite's Cathedral Range for over a century and were brought back in March 2015. Then came the record winter of 2022-23. As of late 2023 California's wildlife department reported no ewes known to have survived in that herd. Surveyors were finding only rams.

Giant sequoias, and the Grizzly Giant is younger than you think. Sequoias are the largest trees on Earth by volume, though not the tallest or the oldest. The Grizzly Giant in the Mariposa Grove is around 2,900 years old, not the 8,000 to 10,000 that got claimed a century ago. It stands 209 feet tall and 96 feet around at the base. It is also the tree Roosevelt and Muir slept under in 1903, and one of the two things the 1864 Grant was written to protect.

The Yosemite designs

Half Dome

About 8,800 feet at the summit, some 4,800 above the valley floor. The last 400 feet are bare polished granite climbed between two steel cables with wooden planks for footholds. George Anderson got up it first in October 1875 by drilling eyebolts as he went; Muir followed within weeks. The permanent cables went in in 1919, and since 2010 the Park Service has capped how many people can be on them each day; nps.gov has the current system. Nearly every fatal fall from the cables has happened when the rock was wet.

El Capitan

Three thousand vertical feet of granite, and the most important big wall on Earth. Warren Harding and two partners took 47 days spread over 18 months to climb The Nose in 1958 and proved multi-day walls were possible. Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson free-climbed the Dawn Wall in 2015 after 19 days living on the face. In June 2017 Alex Honnold climbed it with no rope in three hours and 56 minutes.

Yosemite Falls

A total drop of 2,425 feet in three stages, the upper fall alone plunging 1,430. It is the tallest waterfall in California and among the tallest in North America, though the "fifth tallest in the world" line is disputed because the total counts six separate leaps. The part nobody expects: it runs dry. It is fed entirely by snowmelt, and in all but the wettest years it stops altogether by late summer.

How to record your Yosemite visit

Yosemite, asked and answered