Rangers and tour guides here repeatedly ask visitors to imagine how such an abundance of natural magnificence came to be. It’s as if so much beautiful mountain scenery in one relatively tiny area poses a profound riddle.
Hard-headed scientists might reply in terms of geology, but those swept away by the enchantment of the place tend to lean toward mythic explanations. My favorite tale of Yosemite’s birth concerns a native woman named Tesaiyac, who ran through what is now Yosemite Valley in an effort to escape her surly husband. Tesaiyac’s footprints formed the bed of the Merced River, and acorns that spilled from her basket seeded the riverbanks with mighty black oaks. When the husband caught up with her, they argued so violently that the gods – perhaps seeking peace and quiet – turned them both into stone.
Tesaiyac thus became Half Dome, the trademark peak of Yosemite National Park. Her husband (whose name seems to escape most raconteurs) was transformed into North Dome, a fairly minor formation. And the valley that separated them made their rift eternal – at least until the onset of another ice age and another legend. Ranger Dick Ewart related this ancient tale one evening at Glacier Point, where a crowd had gathered to observe the setting sun as reflected by the face of Half Dome and to hear Ewart give a regularly scheduled talk that accompanies the spectacle.
Standing 3,214 feet above the valley floor and gesturing toward Half Dome, now blushing in the twilight, Ewart invited his audience to search for signs of Tesaiyac’s sad features on that famous granite wall.
“Look at the white area that doesn’t have any cracks in it,” he instructed. “See the brow? A bit of nose? The eyes? The chin down below? From her eyes, you’ll see there are a couple of streaks coming down. Those are the tears of Tesaiyac, who is crying even to this day.”
Ewart let the crowd form its own theories about the cause of her dismay. Regret? Perpetual anger? The thousands of vehicles and hikers, campers, rock climbers and scenery-gawkers who now glut her valley in the high season?
Just before the sun dipped completely and the valley appeared to be nothing more than a yellow snake of headlights, Ewart traced another history of Yosemite – the history that unimaginative sticklers for accuracy insist upon. The gradual disappearance of an inland sea, the clash of continental plates, the rise of molten rock, steady erosion, the onset of glaciers – all contributed to the formation of this unique setting over millions of years.
Half Dome was once a full dome, until ice filled a flaw in it, expanded in the crack and sheared off a piece that one big glacier then dragged along in its westward path.
The features of this park are nearly as familiar to Americans as the monuments on the Mall in Washington, D.C.: El Capitan, with its near-vertical face rising 7,569 feet; Yosemite Falls, highest in North America and fifth-highest in the world, plunging 2,425 feet; misty Bridalveil Falls dropping 620 feet; plus Sentinel Rock, Cathedral Rocks, Three Brothers and all the other formations lined up around one small and glorious valley.
And, of course, no one who has been here ever forgets that dignified face looking sadly down upon the meadows from a height of 8,842 feet: Half Dome itself.
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Yosemite Valley feels enclosed and civilized, tamed and overrun by humans, swarmed upon in the 1850s by Gold Rush zealots and subsequently by entrepreneurs eager to take advantage of a new concept in leisure: tourism. White men chased away the native Miwok and Paiute people but did leave the area with an Indian name: u-zu-ma-te, eventually simplified to “Yosemite” and meaning grizzly bear. The Miwoks called the valley Ahwahnee, or “place of a gaping mouth.”
There are 1,162 square miles of Yosemite National Park outside the teeming valley, and enterprising visitors with stamina and time find a few untrammeled spots where the Wild West becomes wild again.
On and around lofty Tioga Road, motorists and the most intrepid hikers climb onto the High Sierra rooftops, where a few small glaciers linger, the meadows spread out for miles and the mountain peaks and domes reveal the true nature of this landscape. Those who depend on vehicles miss part of the message, but hikers who follow the trails up there can regain a sense of this immense panorama as they tramp to the upper edges of the famous rocks and venture to the dropoff points where rivers and creeks first become raging waterfalls. Then they begin to comprehend the enormous substance beyond the entrancing facade.
John Muir, the prominent conservationist and wilderness eccentric, understood the value of the High Sierra and its vital role as a natural context for the freakily beautiful valley portion of Yosemite.
He first arrived in 1868, four years after the U.S. government granted the valley and the Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias to the state for preservation as a public trust – the nation’s first baby step toward a national park system.
Muir lobbied to have the entire area designated as a national park, cajoling prominent public officials to visit and see for themselves.
In 1892, Muir and other sympathizers formed the Sierra Club to push for wider national-park protection, but the pioneer-spirit drive to “tame” natural resources, rather than preserve them, prevailed at first.
Pressured by officials in San Francisco, President Woodrow Wilson signed legislation in 1913 allowing the damming of the Tuolumne River. This project flooded the Hetch Hetchy Valley – a beautiful expanse in the higher regions of Yosemite – and formed the reservoir that still provides drinking water for San Franciscans. Hetch Hetchy was an Indian word for a kind of vegetable that grew in that valley and, of course, grows there no more.
Historians speculate that the loss of Hetch Hetchy Valley and the exhaustive fight to save it hastened Muir’s death in 1914. Currently, officials worry that the flood of visitors might cause Yosemite to die of slow strangulation.
Last summer, visitors without camp or lodge reservations had to be turned away for six straight weekends. As autumn approached, park officials were experimenting with weekend changes in the traffic patterns, making some roads one-way and closing a few others.
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“Go to Tuolumne Meadows,” a ranger advised me. “Up there, you can really get a feeling for what Yosemite is all about.”
“Up there” is Tioga Road, a highway of long vistas and short seasons. The 55-mile stretch from the Big Oak Flat entrance at the western edge of the park over Tioga Pass (at 9,941 feet the highest automobile pass in California) to the eastern edge of the Sierras hardly could be described as isolated, but the unhindered views and isolated trails provide a backstage peek at the Yosemite everyone knows.
A short trail from Olmsted Point leads to the edge of Tenaya Canyon and a stirring look at the rear, rounded portion of Half Dome. Strong binoculars might reveal intrepid hiking parties filing to the glacier-scrubbed summit. Nearby Tenaya Lake, a mile long and deep blue, holds a mirror to the surrounding crags. And just around a bend in eastbound Tioga Road, Tuolumne Meadows startles visitors with its alpine flowers and its flatness, setting off smooth granite domes, providing both tranquility and drama.
In 10 miles, the terrain became un-Yosemite-like. Massive tan hills and scrabbly gray slopes closed in, then pulled away to let the harsh midafternoon light beat down on the car. I had left Yosemite, and the contrast was almost immediately obvious. This stretch of highway pierced a frighteningly rugged and imposing part of the Toiyabe National Forest. Not many miles ahead I would hit the Nevada border.
I turned around and fled back into the beauty of Yosemite, understanding better why a park becomes a park and all those less-enchanted lands become something else.
