Our Yosemite logo carries California's grizzly and lone star above “California Republic · Est. 1850,” the year of statehood — the shared retro emblem of every Merlin Classics California place. Printed in a worn black-and-white that recalls an old WPA park poster and a crate-label stamp, the bear is California in shorthand: wild, durable, and at home in big country. The bear is the through-line that links Yosemite to every other California place we make. What makes this one Yosemite is everything around it — the granite of Half Dome and El Capitan, the sequoias, the waterfalls, and the valley that taught America to save its wild places.
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.
