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.
Muir's campaign carried it the rest of the way. On October 1, 1890, Congress established Yosemite National Park, wrapping federal protection around the high country surrounding the state-held valley; in 1906 the valley and grove were receded to the federal park, and in 1916 the new National Park Service took over its care. The U.S. Cavalry had patrolled the park in the years between, the first rangers in all but name. Step by step a Gold-Rush militia's valley had become a model that the rest of the country, and much of the world, would copy.
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.
