The park became a wellspring of American art and conservation. Its waterfalls and granite walls drew generations of painters and photographers who fixed Yosemite in the national imagination, and the preservation argument that began here helped build the modern conservation movement. Today Yosemite spreads across roughly 748,000 acres of the Sierra Nevada, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1984, and draws three to four million visitors a year to a valley that, in its essentials, looks much as it did when Muir first walked in.
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.
