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.
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.
