🧗 Yosemite: What You Will Find

Yosemite Valley is seven kilometres long, a kilometre and a half wide, and hemmed in on every side by granite walls. A glacier carved it and left behind a shape that looks designed rather than formed.

About four million people come here a year, and the overwhelming majority of them fit into that one valley, which makes up around one per cent of the park.

El Capitan

Nine hundred metres of unbroken granite, from foot to rim. It is the largest granite monolith in the world and you see it the moment you drive into the valley — and it is far bigger than it looks in a photograph.

Climbers spend days on it. They sleep in hanging cots bolted to the wall, haul their water up on a rope, and use sealable tubes as a toilet which they have to carry back down — that is a condition of the permit.

Two things that happened here are known even to people who do not climb. In January 2015 two climbers free-climbed the Dawn Wall, the smoothest part of the face, for the first time; it took them nineteen days and the world watched the last week of it. And on 3 June 2017 Alex Honnold climbed the Freerider route without a rope. He was on top in three hours and fifty-six minutes. If you notice people in the meadow below with binoculars, staring silently upwards, this is what they are watching.

Half Dome and the Cables

A dome cut in half, 2,693 metres. The glacier did not split it — the missing half was never there; the rock peeled away in layers like the skin of an onion.

A route up runs between two steel cables, on which the last hundred vertical metres are climbed over bare granite at an angle you cannot stand on. The cables are strung only from May to October, and since 2010 they can be used only with a permit from a lottery. The reason is simple: before that there were queues on them, and people died on them.

Waterfalls That Are Not There in August

Yosemite Falls is 739 metres and the highest in North America. In May it can be heard across the whole valley. In August nothing is left of it — it is fed by melting snow, not by a spring, and when the snow runs out it switches off.

So anyone who wants waterfalls comes in May and June. Anyone who wants quiet and colour comes in October.

One exception is worth mentioning. For the last two weeks of February the setting sun strikes at such an angle that the thin Horsetail Fall on the flank of El Capitan looks as though lava were pouring off the cliff. It lasts about ten minutes a day and only on a clear evening with enough water. So many people converge on it that permits are now issued for this too.

Until 1968 a different firefall was staged here: every evening glowing embers were pushed off Glacier Point and fell three hundred metres like a curtain of fire. It was stopped because so many cars came for it that the valley could not cope.

The Sequoias

In the southern part of the park, in the Mariposa Grove, grow about five hundred mature giant sequoias. They are not the tallest trees in the world — those are the coast redwoods — but they are the largest trees by volume.

The oldest of them, the Grizzly Giant, is estimated at over two and a half thousand years. High on its trunk it has a branch that is itself thicker than most trees in Europe.

A sequoia needs fire to germinate: the heat opens the cones and the ash makes the forest floor a suitable bed. A century of putting out every fire did this more harm than the loggers did, and the park now sets controlled fires deliberately.

The Bears That Could Open a Car

Several hundred black bears live in the park. They are smaller than grizzlies and do not attack people, but they learned something else: to recognise cars with food in them.

In the nineties the bears in Yosemite opened cars systematically. They targeted minivans of particular makes, because those could be levered open at the top edge of the door — knowledge the animals passed on. In one year there were over a thousand break-ins.

That is why there are steel lockers in every car park today, and why not even an empty snack wrapper may be left in a car. The bear cannot tell that it is empty and breaks the car open anyway.

Two More Things

Yosemite is not the oldest national park — that is Yellowstone — but it is the first protected land of any kind. In 1864, in the middle of the civil war, Abraham Lincoln signed an act that withdrew the valley from sale and entrusted it to California so that it would stay public. It became a national park in 1890.

And the Ahwahnee Hotel of 1927, that stone building with wooden ceilings in the middle of the valley: its lounge served as the model for the hotel interior in The Shining. It was filmed elsewhere, but it looks like here.