Yosemite National Park at Yosemite, California

The valley floor at Yosemite with El Capitan to the right, Half Dome center in the distance, and Bridal Falls to the right. (Photo by Hunner)

The spectacular landscape of Yosemite’s bald domes and deep valleys, of its crashing waterfalls and rarefied high country vistas took over 100 million years to create. The dramatic cliffs are made of granite, formed deep in the earth as molten rock which slowly cooled and solidified into massive stone megaliths. About sixty-five million years ago, the granite core of the Sierras Nevada mountains became exposed. Twenty-five million years ago, tectonic forces lifted and tilted the granite range and formed the tall Sierra Nevadas. Then the forces of water and ice began to shape the hard stone.

Enter the glaciers. Over the last two to three million years, ice fields and glaciers at times capped the high peaks and during ice ages, descended down the valleys to scour and change the landscape. Rivers had cut “v” shaped valleys, but the grinding of glaciers created “u” shaped ones with wide level floors filled with glacial sediment. Geologic time is writ large in the Yosemite Valley.

Human have also left their marks on the Yosemite landscape. The Ahwahneechee tribe of the Miwok Indians have lived in the Southern Sierras for perhaps 7,000 years. Moving from the deep canyons to high alpine meadows, the Ahwahneechee developed a hunter and gatherer life style suited for the high Sierras. Change came in the early 19^th century with contact with Europeans-Americans. After the Gold Rush brought a flood of miners to the region, John Savage set up a camp in the foothills which was attacked by the tribe. In retaliation, a volunteer militia called the Mariposa Battalion fought and eventually defeated the Ahwahneechee. A lake in the high country where a major battle occurred was named after Ahwahneechee’s Chief Tenaya. Tenaya and his tribe were forcibly removed to a reservation near Fresno, but Congress did not accept any of the eighteen treaties made with Californian Indians in 1851 and 1852. Over the years, even though the U.S. government forcibly evicted the Ahwahneechee from the Yosemite Valley, tribal members still live in the area.

Some argue that Yosemite is our oldest park. Here’s why—President Lincoln, in 1864 in the midst of the Civil War, signed the Yosemite Land Grant, setting aside the Yosemite Valley as a nature reserve run by California. To be sure, Yellowstone became our first National Park in 1872, but Yosemite was our first protected place. Lincoln never visited Yosemite, but his legacy in protecting it place continues to thrill millions of people a year. Four years after Lincoln designated Yosemite as a nature reserve, John Muir arrived in the valley.

Already a world traveler, Muir fell in love with Yosemite—with its high mountains, the Granite Cliffs, the sequoia trees at Mariposa Grove, and the valley floor. In an essay for The Century magazine in 1890, he marveled about the beauties of Yosemite.

The high Sierras on Tioga Road (Photo by Hunner)

About the High Sierra, he wrote: “It seemed to me the Sierra should be called, not the Nevada or Snowy Range, but the Range of Light. And after ten years in the midst of it, rejoicing and wondering, seeing the glorious floods of light that fill it,-- the sunbursts of morning among the mountain peaks, the broad noonday radiance on the crystal rocks, the flush of the alpenglow, and the thousand dashing waterfalls with their marvelous abundance of irised spray,-- it still seems to me a range of light.”[1]

The brow of El Capitan (Photo by Hunner)

Concerning the Granite Cliffs, Muir exults: “The brow of El Capitan was decked with long streamers of snow-like hair, Cloud’s Rest was enveloped in drifting gossamer films, and the Half Dome loomed up in the garish light like some majestic living creature clad in the same gauzy, wind woven drapery, upward currents meeting overhead sometimes making it smoke like a volcano.”[2]

Sequoias at King's Canyon (Photo by Hunner)

Muir glories in the big trees: “The majestic sequoia, too is here, the king of conifers, ‘the noblest of a noble race.’ All these colossal trees are as wonderful in the fineness of their beauty and proportions as in stature, growing together…. Here indeed is the tree-lover’s paradise, the woods, dry and wholesome, letting in the light in shimmering masses half sunshine, half shade, the air indescribably spicy and exhilarating, plushy fir boughs for beds, and cascades to sing us asleep as we gaze through the trees to the stars.”[3]

Yosemite Valley with Half Dome in the background (Photo by Hunner) 

About the Yosemite Valley, he proclaims: “No temple made with hands can compare with the Yosemite. Every rock in its walls seems to glow with life. Some lean back in majestic repose; others, absolutely sheer or nearly so for thousands of feet, advance beyond their companions in thoughtful attitudes…. How softly these mountains are adorned… their feet set in groves and gay emerald meadows, their brows in the thin blue sky, a thousand flowers leaning confidingly against adamantine bosses, bathed in floods of booming water, floods of light while snow, clouds, winds, avalanches, shine and sing and wreathe about them as the years go by!”[4]

Rallying around such words, advocates for Yosemite found allies in Congress, and Yosemite became a National Park in 1892. But the battle was not totally won. To continue to protect the sacred places in the Sierras, in 1901 Muir published Our National Parks, and in 1903, President Teddy Roosevelt visited Yosemite. Muir kidnapped him for several days of camping out in the high country, to the chagrin of the gathered politicos who wanted to bend the president’s ear. Together, Roosevelt and Muir, under the stars around a campfire and hiking over the granite domes, laid the foundation for a conservation policy that protected some natural resources and preserved the shrinking wilderness.

President Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir at Glacier Point in 1903 (Photo from NPS)

The last chapter in Muir’s life ends in a preservation tragedy. At the north end of the Yosemite National Park lays the Hetch Hetchy Valley fed by the Tuolumne River.  The growing city of San Francisco coveted the water in that valley and after the Great Earthquake of 1906, argued and won the rights in 1913 to that liquid resource. With the rights, the city dammed the Hetch Hetchy and siphoned the water off to the Bay Area. Muir and the Sierra Club fought hard against this, and he died a year later, some say a broken man from the loss of this stunning part of a national park.

When I visited Yosemite, the Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias was closed to the public for rehabilitation. There are almost 500 of these largest living things on earth in the grove, which was included in the original grant created by Lincoln in 1864. J. Smeaton Chase, an Englishman, wrote this about Mariposa Grove: “As one stands in the dreamlike silence of these groves of ancient trees, the solemnity of their enormous age and size combine to produce a cathedral mood of quietude and receptiveness.”[5]

Since I couldn’t get to the sequoias in Yosemite, I went south to King’s Canyon to experience these Big Trees. Granted, redwoods are taller, but sequoias’ trunks are bigger, and those massive trunks retain their girth as the trees climb. In terms of actual living mass, sequoias have more wood than redwoods.

The General Grant Sequoia at King's Canyon (Photo by Hunner)

I arrived at the General Grant tree after a brisk walk from the nearby campground, late for a Ranger Amber’s talk. This is the second biggest tree in the world, with the General Sherman tree at Sequoia NP taking the honors. Between 1,600 and 1,800 years old, the General Grant sequoia takes twenty people holding hands to encircle its trunk and in a weird statistic, could hold more than 37,000,000 ping pong balls. Here’s some more stats on the General Grant: height = 268 feet (82 meters); circumference = 107 feet (33 meters); diameter = 40 feet (12 meters); and weight = 1,254 tons (1,325 metric tons). 

The trunk of a sequoia at King's Canyon. Notice the people on the left. (Photo by Hunner)

A saving grace for all sequoias is that they burst into splinters when felled so they are unsuitable for lumber planks. Shingles, yes and also fence posts, but considering it takes so much effort to cut one down, the resultant wood is not worth the trouble.

At the end of her presentation, I talked with some rangers about my concerns concerning all the dead trees on the western slopes of the Sierras. I had read in a Los Angeles Times  story that Sunday that the U.S. Forest Service estimated the 20,000,000 trees in the Sierra Nevadas had died since October and 60,000,000 since 2010.[6] I asked if wild fires could sweep through the groves here, at Sequoia National Park, and at Yosemite, and destroy these majestic ancient beings. One of the rangers said: “Perhaps we are the last generation to see these monarchs of trees.” Shocked, I spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around this cathedral of giants.

A trunk of a massive sequoia at King's Canyon (Photo by Hunner)

Yosemite, Kings Canyon, and Sequoia National Parks are places of immense beauty and spirit. Granite megaliths, ancient trees, deep valleys, high alpine mountains, tall waterfalls, they establish the sacredness of wilderness and allow us to commune with natural wonder. They change, as Muir wrote, our perception of nature and the world around us. Without such parks and without the people who struggled and continue to work to preserve these places, we would be a lesser nation and people. Just ask the over 4,000,000 people who visited Yosemite in 2015 or the 300,000,000 who went to some unit in our NPS system last year. The parks transcend our differences and unites us around their natural and historical landscapes.

The Upper and Lower Yosemite Falls, the tallest waterfall in the U.S. (Photo by Hunner)

Yosemite became a National Park on October 1, 1890 and was designated a World Heritage Site on Oct. 31, 1984. King’s Canyon was established as General Grant NP on Oct. 1, 1890 and was renamed and enlarged in 1940. Sequoia NP was created on Sept. 25, 1890

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[1] John Muir, The Treasures of the Yosemite, (Lane Magazine and Book Company: Menlo Park, 1970), 16.

[2] Ibid, 48.

[3] Ibid, 20.

[4] Ibid, 18-19.

[5]Ardeth Huntington, YosemiteNational Park: A Personal Discovery (Mariposa, California: Sierra Press, n.d.), 41.

[6] Los Angeles Times, June 23, 2016, A-1.

Redwoods National and State Parks, Crescent City, California and Muir Woods, National Monument, Mill Valley, California

Let’s be frank. Words and photos cannot adequately capture some of the wondrous parks in our land. Redwoods NP and Muir Woods NM fall into this category. These are several of the Crown Jewels of the NPS. To truly cover these two NPS site and the other natural wonders of the California, we also need to look at John Muir, the grand spirit of the High Sierras. First, these majestic parks, the redwoods, then Muir.

Tall trees at Redwoods NP (Photo by Hunner)

At Redwoods National and State Parks on the Pacific coast in northern California, the tallest living things in the world grow. They reach upwards of 370 feet, and their trunks are fifteen feet in diameter. Some redwoods are as tall as the Statue of Liberty and taller than a thirty story building.  Standing at a base of a redwood with hands on the grooved bark and looking up, I marveled at the size and age of such trees. Most groves hold trees 500 to 700 years old with some older than 2,000 years. These ancient beings are not only the tallest living things on the planet, but some of the oldest.

Redwoods thrive along the coastal mountains of northern California. Fog in the summer brings nourishing moisture, and the lack of winter frost ensures a year round growing season. Their bark is fire resistant and repels harmful bugs. At the Redwoods Parks, I spent hours hiking along the Brown Creek, Rhododendron, and South Fork Trails. As I first wandered and gazed up at these ancient groves, I kept stumbling on the exposed roots. One ranger told me that the root system is their only weakness. Since these tall trees have no tap root and are shallow, not much deeper than eight to ten feet, they are prone to winds which can knock them over. The roots do spread out up to 100 feet, and cover the grove’s floor. I made slow progress as I looked up at the giants and glanced down at their roots. In truth, I stumbled a lot under the red and green canopy of the forest.

A downed redwood with exposed shallow root system (Photo by Hunner)

The Redwoods Parks is a joint venture between the NPS and California State Parks. For forty miles of coastline along the Pacific, the state and national parks preserve these wondrous trees. Preservation started over 100 years ago as alarms grew about the decimation of the redwood groves by logging.

In 1918, the Save-the-Redwoods League formed and began buying up threatened groves that are now Jedediah Smith, Del Norte Coast, and Prairie Creek Redwoods State Parks. While the State Parks protected these tall trees, more old growth forests fell. A survey by the National Geographic Society in the 1960s revealed that of the “original 2 million acres of virgin redwoods, only 300,000 acres, or 15 percent, remained uncut, with 50,000 of those acres in state parks.”[1] This report galvanized many to seek further protection. The Sierra Club proposed a 90,000 acre park while those in the lumber industry countered with claiming that just the three existing state parks should become the national one. Congress compromised and established the 58,000 acre Redwood NP in 1968 to compliment the state parks.

Who worked to protect the redwoods? Of course, many people called for their preservation, perhaps none so influential as John Muir. Born in Dunbar, Scotland in 1838, he came with his family to Wisconsin in 1849. He studied botany, chemistry, and geology for several years at the University of Wisconsin-Madison until he left to attend what he called “the University of the Wilderness.” In the late 1860s, he suffered an eye injury at a factory that temporarily blinded him. Once recovered, he walked 1,000 miles to Florida. Eventually, he arrived in San Francisco by boat in 1868 and wandered around the Golden State.

John Muir (from www.pbs.com)

When he got to Sierra Nevadas, he settled in the Yosemite Valley where he built humble shacks, worked at a saw mill, and herded sheep. And he fell into a deep love with the mountains, valleys, and meadows of the Sierra Nevadas.  About the high country, Muir wrote: “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.” Reveling in the spirituality that surrounded him in the mountains, Muir started writing to proclaim the benefits of going into the wilderness. 

To the revered writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, Muir invited him to join him: "Do not thus drift away with the mob, while the spirits of these rocks and waters hail after you, after long waiting as their kinsman and persuade you to closer communion.... I invite you to join me in a month's worship with Nature in the high temples of the great Sierra Crown beyond our holy Yosemite." His writings attracted Emerson and others to join and support the preservation of these holy places. 

Muir did not see Nature as a warehouse of natural resources, but as a storehouse of spiritual sources, and he actively sought to protect these temples of God. His main tool was his pen. He wrote about Nature for many different publications and helped get Congress to protect Yosemite in 1890. In 1892, along with a number of supporters, Muir founded the Sierra Club. He wanted to "do something for wildness and make the mountains glad." He was its president until his death in 1914, and the Sierra Club continues to be a strong voice for preservation.

His advocacy for nature, his cries for the protection of tall trees, alpine meadows, thundering waterfalls, mirror lakes, deep valleys, and high domes helped create the preservation movement that led to the establishment of the National Park Service in 1916. We will come back to him in the next week’s posting about Yosemite. Let’s return to the glorious redwoods.

Tall trees (Photo by Hunner)

Muir Woods, in the hills north of the Golden Gate Bridge, also honors the redwoods.  A postage stamp sized park at 553 acres, its attraction is up, not on the ground. Two paved paths snake up the narrow valley on each side of the small Redwood Creek. Many people were at Muir Woods the day I was there, but they mainly walked on the main trails along the creek bed. I jumped off the Redwood Creek Trail and quickly left the crowds as I hiked up the Canopy View Trail. Ambling along, breathing in the rich oxygen given off by these consumers of carbon dioxide, I breathed in the scents of trees hundreds, even thousands of years old and communed with these ancient beings. Talking about the groves at Muir Woods, a friend once said: “Nature is so generous. It is eternity.” This is a magical place.

At a table near the visitors’ center, I met two summer employees -- Danielle Shinmoto and Brandon Burkes. These college students explained the acquisition of the park. In 1905, William and Elizabeth Thacher Kent paid $45,000 for this valley to save some of the last uncut stands of redwoods near San Francisco. After the 1906 earthquake, the North Coast Water Company tried to gain access to the redwoods for the wood to help rebuild San Francisco, but the Kents thwarted this by donating 295 acres to the federal government. In 1908, President Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed their property a National Monument. The Kents insisted that the monument be named to honor John Muir’s conservation efforts.

Muir and William Kent
(From Wikipedia Commons)

Elizabeth Thacher Kent
(From wikipedia Commons)

How could the president set aside public lands? The recently signed Antiquities Act gave Teddy that power, and presidents to this day invoke this act to preserve unique pieces of our land and heritage. Roosevelt was a new type of politician, a “progressive” who reshaped our government.  

Through the 19th century, laissez-faire capitalism ruled, and natural resources were used without much thought about the future. After the turn of the 20th century, a new ethos emerged that centered around the policy of what would bring "the greatest good for the greatest number of people over the greatest period of time." This long view utilitarian approach to Nature transformed the previous hands-off, no regulation attitude. Throughout the 20th century, the utilitarian policy has ruled so that we now scientifically manage the resources on our public lands.

The history of the NPS reflects the web and flow of the struggle between the policies of laissez-faire versus the management of our natural resources on public lands. William Kent, being a Progressive member of the U.S. House of Representatives, supported the protection of our natural resources and introduced and helped pass the Organic Act of 1916 which created the National Park Service.

Without John Muir, Teddy Roosevelt, Elizabeth and William Kent, and thousands of others, we might not have Muir Woods and Redwoods National Parks, we might not have Manzanar NHP and Independence Hall NHP, we might not even have the National Park Service. The deep yearning and dedication of many people to preserve our natural and historic sites have enriched our country. 

Without these people and these treasured places, we would be a lesser country.

Redwoods National Park was established by Congress and President Lyndon Johnson on Oct. 2, 1968. It now has 105,516 acres. In 1980, it was designated as a World Heritage Site. Muir Woods was proclaimed a National Monument on January 9, 1908 by President Teddy Roosevelt in the last months of his presidency. It now holds 553 acres. 

Redwoods and Rhododendrons at Redwoods NP (Photo by Hunner)

[1] Richard Rasp, Redwood: The Story Behind the Scenery(KC Publications, 1989),46-47.