YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK

The Yosemite National Park is much greater, both in area and beauty, than is generally known. Nearly all Americans who have not explored it consider it identical with the far-famed Yosemite Valley. The fact is that the Valley is only a very small part, indeed, of this glorious public pleasure ground. It was established October 1, 1890, but its boundary lines have been changed several times since then. It now has an area of 1,176.16 square miles, 752,744 acres.

This magnificent pleasure land lies on the west slope of the Sierra Nevada about 200 miles due east of San Francisco. The crest of the range is its eastern boundary as far south as Mount Lyell. The rivers which water it originate in the everlasting snows. A thousand icy streams converge to form them. They flow west through a marvelous sea of peaks, resting by the way in hundreds of snow-bordered lakes, romping through luxuriant valleys, rushing turbulently over rocky heights, swinging in and out of the shadows of mighty mountains.

The Yosemite Valley occupies 8 square miles out of a total of 1,176 square miles in the Yosemite National Park. The park above the rim is less celebrated principally because it is less known. It is less known principally because it was not opened to the public by motor road until 1915. Now several roads and 700 miles of trail make much of the spectacular high-mountain region of the park easily accessible.

For the rest, the park includes, in John Muir’s words, “the headwaters of the Tuolumne and Merced Rivers, two of the most songful streams in the world; innumerable lakes and waterfalls and smooth silky lawns; the noblest forests, the loftiest granite domes, the deepest ice-sculptured canyons, the brightest crystalline pavements, and snowy mountains soaring into the sky twelve and thirteen thousand feet, arrayed in open ranks and spiry pinnacled groups partially separated by tremendous canyons and amphitheaters; gardens on their sunny brows, avalanches thundering down their long white slopes, cataracts roaring gray and foaming in the crooked, rugged gorges, and glaciers in their shadowy recesses, working in silence, slowly completing their sculptures; new-born lakes at their feet, blue and green, free or encumbered with drifting icebergs like miniature Arctic Oceans, shining, sparkling, calm as stars.”