Yosemite National Park Quotes

The making of gardens and parks goes on with civilization all over the world, and they increase both in size and number as their value is recognized. Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where Nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike. This natural beauty-hunger is made manifest in the little windowsill gardens of the poor, though perhaps only a geranium slip in a broken cup, as well as in the carefully tended rose and lily gardens of the rich, the thousands of spacious city parks and botanical gardens, and in our magnificent National Parks—the Yellowstone, Yosemite, Sequoia, etc.—Nature's sublime wonderlands, the admiration and joy of the world. Nevertheless, like anything else worth while, from the very beginning, however well guarded, they have always been subject to attack by despoiling gain-seekers and mischief-makers of every degree from Satan to Senators, eagerly trying to make everything immediately and selfishly commercial, with schemes disguised in smug-smiling philanthropy, industriously, sham-piously crying, "Conservation, conservation, panutilization," that man and beast may be fed and the dear Nation made great. Thus long ago a few enterprising merchants utilized the Jerusalem temple as a place of business instead of a place of prayer, changing money, buying and selling cattle and sheep and doves; and earlier still, the first forest reservation, including only one tree, was likewise despoiled. Ever since the establishment of the Yosemite National Park, strife has been going on around its borders and I suppose this will go on as part of the universal battle between right and wrong, however much of its boundaries may be shorn, or its wild beauty destroyed.

We take too much of our heritage for granted. Harriman State Park is not Mt. Vernon. Nor is it Yosemite. But heritage cannot be measured on a scale...

Starker [Leopold] had an adage for people in public service: 'If you're ashamed of it, don't do it. If you're not, publicize it.' " -David Graber, wildlife biologist at Yosemite National Park

I was bypassing the High Sierra—missing Sequoia and Kings Canyon and Yosemite national parks, Tuolumne Meadows and the John Muir and Desolation wildernesses

She knew her mother was likely to blow her top like a geyser in Yosemite National Park, but Mary had stopped giving a damn one way or another.

It’s pretty here all right, so pretty that you can get stupid looking at it and forget to pay attention to Death, who walks up wearing Yosemite as if it were a fine suit of clothes, and while you’re admiring the cloth and color, there’s Death standing in front of you and smiling, considering all the ways he’s got to kill you. Yeah, death hides in beauty. *   *   *

at the Ahwahnee Lodge in Yosemite National Park. Built in the 1920s, the Ahwahnee is a sprawling pile of stone, concrete, and timber designed in a style that mixed Art Deco, the Arts and Crafts movement,

The story is, a man came up to Yosemite and the ranger was sitting at the front gate and the man said, "I've only got one hour to see Yosemite. If you only had one hour to see Yosemite, what would you do?" And the ranger said, "Well, I'd go right over there, and I'd sit on that rock, and I'd cry." - Nevada Barr

I don’t know what, if anything, comes after this life. But I can tell you this: If there is a Heaven, I bet it looks a lot like Yosemite.

Freedom. It stays in your head and won't bust out or slip away like tears.

What confounds this dilemma further is that individual animals within a species have varying cognitive abilities. To quote the Yosemite National Park ranger who, when asked why it was proving so hard to make a garbage bin that bears couldn’t break into, said, “There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists.

This place, the land is more ancient and pure; it's like a concentrated tonic for the soul. If you take too much it can infect you, and if you don't take enough you have missed it completely and your efforts were in vein.

Early naturalists talked often about “deep time”—the perception they had, contemplating the grandeur of this valley or that rock basin, of the profound slowness of nature. But the perspective changes when history accelerates. What lies in store for us is more like what aboriginal Australians, talking with Victorian anthropologists, called “dreamtime,” or “everywhen”: the semi-mythical experience of encountering, in the present moment, an out-of-time past, when ancestors, heroes, and demigods crowded an epic stage. You can find it already by watching footage of an iceberg collapsing into the sea—a feeling of history happening all at once. It is. The summer of 2017, in the Northern Hemisphere, brought unprecedented extreme weather: three major hurricanes arising in quick succession in the Atlantic; the epic “500,000-year” rainfall of Hurricane Harvey, dropping on Houston a million gallons of water for nearly every single person in the entire state of Texas; the wildfires of California, nine thousand of them burning through more than a million acres, and those in icy Greenland, ten times bigger than those in 2014; the floods of South Asia, clearing 45 million from their homes. Then the record-breaking summer of 2018 made 2017 seem positively idyllic. It brought an unheard-of global heat wave, with temperatures hitting 108 in Los Angeles, 122 in Pakistan, and 124 in Algeria. In the world’s oceans, six hurricanes and tropical storms appeared on the radars at once, including one, Typhoon Mangkhut, that hit the Philippines and then Hong Kong, killing nearly a hundred and wreaking a billion dollars in damages, and another, Hurricane Florence, which more than doubled the average annual rainfall in North Carolina, killing more than fifty and inflicting $17 billion worth of damage. There were wildfires in Sweden, all the way in the Arctic Circle, and across so much of the American West that half the continent was fighting through smoke, those fires ultimately burning close to 1.5 million acres. Parts of Yosemite National Park were closed, as were parts of Glacier National Park in Montana, where temperatures also topped 100. In 1850, the area had 150 glaciers; today, all but 26 are melted.

established Yellowstone as the first national park on March 1, 1872. President Lincoln had signed a bill in 1864 that permitted California to preserve the Yosemite Valley and the giant sequoias of the Mariposa Grove, but it was Grant who initiated the modern national park system.

Let us consider Elfland as a great national park, a vast and beautiful place where a person goes by himself, on foot, to get in touch with reality in a special, private, profound fashion. But what happens when it is considered merely as a place to "get away to"? Well, you know what has happened to Yosemite. Everybody comes, not with an ax and a box of matches, but in a trailer with a motorbike on the back and a motorboat on top and a butane stove, five aluminum folding chairs, and a transistor radio on the inside. They arrive totally encapsulated in a secondhand reality. And then they move on to Yellowstone, and it's just the same there, all trailers and transistors. They go from park to park, but they never really go anywhere; except when one of them who thinks that even the wildlife isn't real gets chewed up by a genuine, firsthand bear. The same sort of thing seems to be happening to Elfland, lately.

no longer think there’s one specific path that leads to enlightenment or salvation. I don’t think Muir did, either. Except, perhaps, for the path of the trail itself. “The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness,” he once wrote. I don’t know what, if anything, comes after this life. But I can tell you this: If there is a Heaven, I bet it looks a lot like Yosemite.

Yosemite is so large that you can think of it as five parks. Yosemite Valley, famous for waterfalls and cliffs, and Wawona, where the giant sequoias stand, are open all year. Hetch Hetchy, home of less-used backcountry trails, closes after the first big snow and reopens in May or June. The subalpine high country, Tuolumne Meadows, is open for summer hiking and camping; in winter it’s accessible only via cross-country skis or snowshoes. Badger Pass Ski Area is open in winter only. Most visitors spend their time along the park’s southwestern border, between Wawona and Big Oak Flat Entrance; a bit farther east in Yosemite Valley and Badger Pass Ski Area; and along the east–west corridor of Tioga Road, which spans the park north of Yosemite Valley and bisects Tuolumne Meadows.

Onward and upward he pushed until rock, ground, and forest came to an end, until there was nothing but a sharp edge of blunt earth protruding in the late light of the range, where he could see well beyond the park boundaries to national forest land that he had once scouted on foot and horseback. He remembered it then as roadless, the only trails being those hacked by Indians and prospectors. He had taken notes on the flora and fauna, commented on the age of the bristlecone pine trees at the highest elevations, the scrub oak in the valleys, the condors overhead, the trout in alpine tarns. He had lassoed that wild land in ink, returned to Washington, and sent the sketch to the president, who preserved it for posterity. What did Michelangelo feel at the end of his life, staring at a ceiling in the Vatican or a marble figure in Florence? Pinchot knew. And those who followed him, his great-great-grandchildren, Teddy's great-great-grandchildren, people living in a nation one day of five hundred million people, could find their niche as well. Pinchot felt God in his soul, and thanked him, and weariness in his bones. He sensed he had come full circle.

Carol built her cabin in the wilderness for many of the same reasons as Thoreau, who went to the woods “to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could learn what it had to teach, and not, when I come to die, discover that I had not lived.” Like Thoreau, Carol was a student of nature and a geographical extension of the wilderness that surrounded her. Both explored a life stripped down to its essentials. They wanted “to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.” Thoreau believed wilderness provided a necessary counterbalance to the materialism and urbanization of industrialized America. It was a place of self-renewal and contact with the raw material of life. “In wildness is the preservation of the world,” he famously wrote. Thoreau was among the first to advocate for protecting America’s vanishing wildlands, proposing that the nation formally preserve “a certain sample of wild nature . . . a network of national preserves in which the bear and the panther may still exist and not be civilized off the face of the earth.” Wilderness preserves could provide a perpetual frontier to keep overindustrialized Americans in contact with the primitive honesty of the woods. In 1872—the same year that Tom and Andy founded Carnegie Steel—America designated its first national park: over two million acres in northwest Wyoming were set aside as Yellowstone National Park. A second national park soon followed, thanks to the inspiration of Sierra Club founder John Muir. He so loved the Sierra that he proposed a fifteen-hundred-square-mile park around Yosemite Valley and spent decades fighting for it. When Yosemite National Park was finally signed into law in 1890, Muir

Back then the Appalachian Trail was barely a trail at all—it consisted of over 2,000 miles of mostly unmarked wilderness from Mount Katahdin in Maine to Mount Oglethorpe in Georgia. A man named Benton MacKaye had proposed its creation in the early 1920s. He had utopian visions about a place that could “transcend the economic scramble” and be a balm on the American psyche after World War I. He thought the trail could lift people out of the drudgery of modern life. Government workers needed a relaxing place to recuperate, he wrote in his proposal. Housewives, he said, could use the trail’s rejuvenating powers too. They could come during their leisure time. It could even be a cure for mental illness, whose sufferers “need acres not medicine.” Civilization was weakening, he said. Americans needed a path forward. The Appalachian Trail was the solution. There was still so much undeveloped land in the United States. The West had Yosemite and Yellowstone, and many more national parks, but the East Coast was the most populous part of the country, and the people who lived there should have something to rival the western parks. National parks already dotted the East Coast’s landscape, but what if they could be united? MacKaye imagined what Americans would see as they strode the length of the trail: the “Northwoods” pointed firs on Mount Washington, the placid, pine-rimmed lakes of the Adirondacks. They would cross the Delaware Water Gap, the Potomac, and Harpers Ferry. They could follow Daniel Boone’s footsteps through southern Appalachia to the hardwood forests of North Carolina and end at Springer Mountain in Georgia. They would know their country. Barbara was swept up by

I guess it’s kind of like the subtle difference between a state park and a national park. State parks are great, right? But once you know places like Yosemite are out there, then it’s hard not to want something that feels like that. I want a relationship that feels like a national park.

The making of gardens and parks goes on with civilization all over the world, and they increase both in size and number as their value is recognized. Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where Nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike. This natural beauty-hunger is made manifest in the little window-sill gardens of the poor, though perhaps only a geranium slip in a broken cup, as well as in the carefully tended rose and lily gardens of the rich, the thousands of spacious city parks and botanical gardens, and in our magnificent National parks—the Yellowstone, Yosemite, Sequoia, etc.—Nature’s sublime wonderlands, the admiration and joy of the world.

1899, the 24th Mounted Infantry, an African American army regiment, was entrusted with the protection of Yosemite, Sequoia, and Kings Canyon National Parks in California. For a long time people forgot their presence in the parks’ history, until Shelton Johnson found a picture.

In the May 2021 issue of The Atlantic, Ojibwe writer David Treuer wrote a piece entitled “Return the National Parks to the Tribes.” In it, he describes how the US government displaced the Miwok tribe from the land that would, thirty-nine years later, become Yosemite Park.

Fresno, California, sits in the center of the San Joaquin Valley in the middle of the state. “Ash tree” in Spanish, Fresno is the closest major city to Yosemite National Park.

Lyell Glacier Resting on the northern slope of Mt. Lyell (the highest peak in the park), Lyell Glacier is the largest glacier in Yosemite. It’s also the second largest glacier in the Sierra Nevada and one of the southernmost glaciers in North America. Both the mountain and the glacier are named for Charles Lyell, whose 1830 book Principles of Geology has been called “the most seminal work in geology.” (Ironically, when the theory of Ice Ages was first advanced in the 1830s, Lyell did not believe it, and he argued against it for decades.) Over the past century, Lyell Glacier has been shrinking due to warming temperatures. In 2013 it was determined that Lyell Glacier is no longer moving, and thus should be technically classified as an “ice field.

Tuolumne Grove This small grove of giant sequoias is often overshadowed by the more famous Mariposa Grove in Wawona, but the Tuolumne Grove is definitely worth a visit if you’re enchanted by the big trees. The grove is located about a half mile past the Crane Flat junction. A two-mile round-trip path starts from the parking area and drops about 500 feet as it passes by 25 giant sequoias. Among the notables: a tree with a tunnel cut through the trunk (the tunnel was cut in 1878), and a giant tree that rises nearly 300 feet—one of the tallest giant sequoias in the world.

no place on Earth had more fantastically big walls in a more gloriously accessible location than Yosemite. In the 1940s and 50s, a motley collection of climbing personalities descended on the park to put their skills to the test. Among the new arrivals was a 47-year-old Swiss ironworker named John Salathé, who pioneered an important new piece of climbing equipment: the steel piton. This strong metal spike, fashioned with an eye-hole at one end, could be hammered into cracks to provide a safe, secure anchor for ropes. Although pitons already existed in Europe, they were made with soft, malleable iron that often buckled in Yosemite’s hard granite cracks. Salathé’s steel pitons, by contrast, held strong and could be reused, which meant carrying much less equipment on big climbs. Salathé then unleashed another revolutionary concept in Yosemite: the multi-day climb. After climbing all day, Salathé spent the night strapped to the face of the rock. No longer constrained by equipment or daylight, climbers could rise as high as their bodies would take them.

Ahwahnee has hosted dozens of celebrities, including Queen Elizabeth, Eleanor Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy (who arrived via helicopter). Lucille Ball, Desi Arnaz, and Judy Garland stayed here while filming The Long, Long Trailer, as did William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy while filming Star Trek IV. Robert Redford worked at the Ahwahnee before launching his film career, and Steve Jobs was married on the back lawn in a Buddhist ceremony.

From Florida Muir set sail for California, arriving in San Francisco in 1868. He immediately set out on a six-week walk to Yosemite. Spellbound by Yosemite’s scenery—“every feature glowing, radiating beauty that pours into our flesh and bones like heat rays from fire”—Muir found

The National Park Service and the Yosemite Conservancy are teaming on a $36 million project to improve the lot of giant sequoias in the Mariposa Grove.

Adirondack Park, a 6-million-acre wilderness area and parkland in the Adirondack Mountains, is larger than Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Canyon, Glacier, and Olympic national parks combined.

I can never quite make out the words, and I’m afraid I’ll have to leave Yosemite before I understand what God is saying to me, and what I should be saying back.

THE ADIRONDACK PARK, a vast wilderness area sprawling over six million acres in northeastern New York, is the largest public land preserve in the contiguous United States. Roughly the size of Vermont, it is larger than seven other American states—so large, in fact, the national parks of Yellowstone, Yosemite, Glacier, the Grand Canyon, and the Great Smoky Mountains could all fit neatly within its boundaries.

What if each American landowner made it a goal to convert half of his or her lawn to productive native plant communities? Even moderate success could collectively restore some semblance of ecosystem function to more than twenty million acres of what is now ecological wasteland. How big is twenty million acres? It’s bigger than the combined areas of the Everglades, Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Teton, Canyonlands, Mount Rainier, North Cascades, Badlands, Olympic, Sequoia, Grand Canyon, Denali, and the Great Smoky Mountains National Parks. If we restore the ecosystem function of these twenty million acres, we can create this country’s largest park system. It gives me the shivers just to write about it. Because so much of this park will be created at our homes, I suggest we call it Homegrown National Park.

Ash tree” in Spanish, Fresno is the closest major city to Yosemite National Park.

But they can hardly have missed the part of Olmsted’s document that teaches a stirring civics lesson: “It is the main duty of government, if it is not the sole duty of government, to provide means of protection for all its citizens in the pursuit of happiness against the obstacles, otherwise insurmountable, which the selfishness of individuals or combinations of individuals is liable to interpose to that pursuit.”1 As Olmsted sees it, Yosemite has the potential to close out the era in which the prize manifestations of nature’s beauty have been reserved for the wealthy.

Utah boasted experience of dam building on a grand scale, having completed the O’Shaughnessy Dam in Yosemite National Park’s Hetch Hetchy Valley in 1923 for a San Francisco municipal water project. That $7 million project had had enough peculiarities to toughen the hide of any construction man. For one thing, it was the subject of one of the most explosive environmental battles in American history,

Rose Bethe, who was then twenty-four, understood instantly. “My wife knew vaguely what we were talking about,” says Bethe, “and on a walk in the mountains in Yosemite National Park she asked me to consider carefully whether I really wanted to continue to work on this.

,This is a lovely walk with views of the back of Yosemite National Park and Kaiser Peak ... Perhaps by the time you read and walk this trail, improvements will have been made to clarify the ambiguities. As of this writing, the middle of this walk is more closely a deer and animal trail than a footpath. - Pam Geisel HIKE NUMBER 12: The Dogwood Trail, p. 77

The S. J. & E. [railroad] grade can offer beautiful views of the San Joaquin river basin, the Yosemite National Park, and the Southern Slopes of Kaiser Peak. Built in 1912 in a period of 157 days, this nostalgic route through the mountains features wildflowers - Greg Goodman on HIKE NUMBER 20, p. 135

tourists at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco and Yosemite National Park were asked to draw pictures of themselves. When the researchers compared the resulting drawings, they found that people drew themselves as much smaller when immersed in the grandeur of Yosemite than in the hubbub of San Francisco. This study offers a striking illustration of the experience many people have in moments of awe: the feeling of being “small or insignificant.” Keltner calls this phenomenon the small self, and while it may sound unpleasant, in fact for most people it comes with a euphoric feeling of resonance and oneness with other beings. People in this state often say that they feel the presence of a higher power and that day-to-day concerns recede from their attention.

Hetch Hetchy Reservoir (see map 04.01). Entirely within the borders of Yosemite National Park, Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, near the headwaters of the Tuolumne River, supplies 85% of the city of San Francisco’s drinking water.5 As upgrades to downstream reservoirs have come online, the people of California are changing their attitude about this reservoir’s value and whether it still outweighs the value of restoration of the Hetch Hetchy Valley.

Shelton Johnson may just be the best park ranger who ever lived.

By Anne Kihagi - For Wine Enthusiasts Looking for Off-Beaten Path Ideas- Consider the Town of MurphysSuggested by Anne Kihagi California is known for its numerous vineyards and wineries. Located in Calaveras County, the town of Murphys is situated between Yosemite National Park and Lake Tahoe. It is home to several dozen wineries that operate year-round. Some of the wineries in the town include Indian Rock Vineyards, Mineral Wines Tasting Room, Newsome Harlow, and Courtwood Wine Tasting Tours. The town also offers unique boutique shops, art galleries, and fine dining. You can find items that are new to you at Best Friends Consignment Shop, peruse baseball cards at KCK Collectibles, and sample olive oil at Marisolio Olive Oil Tasting Bar. Unwind after a long day of shopping and wine tasting with dinner at Gabby’s Mexican Cuisine or V Restaurant, Bar, and Bistro. If you have a sweet tooth, visit JoMa’s Artisan Ice Cream or Aria Bakery. A place of interest located near Murphys is Moaning Cavern in Calaveras Trees State Park. It is the largest cavern in the state. If you are a history buff, you will enjoy learning about the town’s origins during the Gold Rush Era. It was started in 1848 by brothers John and Daniel Murphy. Some of the town’s original buildings are still in operation, like the Murphys Historic Hotel and Lodge. It earned a registered historic landmark designation because of the significant figures who once visited it, including Mark Twain and General Ulysses S. Grant.

Unless something is extraordinarily painful, physically or emotionally, we have the power to shift attention away from it to something more enjoyable or useful. For example, when I sit in my dentist’s chair, I’ll deliberately remember walking through high alpine meadows in Yosemite National Park.

Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where Nature may heal and cheer give strength to body and soul alike,” Muir wrote in The Yosemite.

YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK, Calif. — In an otherworldly grove of cinnamon-colored

At the heart of conventional conservation is the model of the American national park. The Indian environmentalist Madhav Gadgil writes of the influence of the top-down strategy modeled on Yosemite National Park, whose establishment in 1890 followed the forcible expulsion of the Native Americans who lived there. The history of "America's best idea" goes hand in hand with the history of white supremacy over nature and the Indigenous people of North America.

In October 1890 two national parks were created, Sequoia and Yosemite