Today Yosemite is a crown jewel of the national parks — granite, giant sequoias, and the valley where, in 1864, America first decided some land was too beautiful to lose. Its story runs from the Ahwahneechee homeland and the 1851 displacement, through the 1864 Lincoln Grant and Muir's advocacy, to the 1890 park and a World Heritage Site visited by millions. Our Yosemite designs gather that identity into wearable form — the bear, the granite, and the sequoias. Yosemite, California: granite, giant sequoias, and the valley that taught America to save its wild places. Est. 1890.
Then the country did something it had never done before. In 1864, in the middle of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Yosemite Grant, ceding Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove to the State of California on the condition that they be preserved, unspoiled, for public use — the first time the United States set aside scenic land purely for preservation. It predated Yellowstone and the national-park system itself; in a real sense the idea of the national park was born here. Galen Clark, the valley's first appointed Guardian, looked after the grant in those early years.
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.
