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The valley was a homeland long before it was a park. For thousands of years the Ahwahneechee, a Southern Sierra Miwok people, lived in the valley they called Ahwahnee, fishing the Merced River, tending oak groves, and burning the meadows to keep them open. That world was shattered in 1851, when the Mariposa Battalion — a state militia raised during the Gold Rush — entered the valley and forced the Ahwahneechee from their land, the first documented entry of non-Native people and the violent beginning of the valley's American chapter. The name Yosemite itself comes down from that era; the place name the people used for their home was Ahwahnee.
What the soldiers found, others soon came to see. Within a few years travelers, hoteliers, and photographers were making the hard trip into the valley, and word of its scale spread east. The granite here is on a scale that stops people cold: Half Dome rising nearly a vertical mile above the valley floor, El Capitan standing as the largest exposed granite monolith in the United States, and Yosemite Falls dropping 2,425 feet in three tiers — among the tallest waterfalls in North America. Add the giant sequoias of the Mariposa Grove, trees older than the republic, and it is easy to see why the valley unsettled the people who first tried to describe it.
Why People Visit Yosemite
Yosemite offers wilderness on a scale few places can match — a glacier-cut valley of granite cliffs and waterfalls, giant sequoias older than the country, and the high Sierra beyond, all carrying the founding story of the national-park idea. Visitors come for Half Dome, El Capitan, and the falls, and stay for the sequoias, the meadows, and the long Sierra light. From a valley stroll to the high country, it rewards a day or a week. It is timeless, humbling, and unmistakably California.
