Yosemite VI: Wapama Falls at Hetch Hetchy

Our final Yosemite destination last weekend was Hetch Hetchy, my second visit to this remarkable and controversial valley at the northern end of Yosemite National Park. The valley is beautiful despite the reduction in its dimensions and grandeur by the controversial decision to build a dam and flood the valley a century ago. I cannot help but feel some sadness over that outcome, one that John Muir vigorously opposed in his last days. Only he and others of that era saw the valley before it was drown to satiate San Francisco’s thirst for water. I can only hope that the valley will be restored someday, with the water supply and hydroelectric energy the dam provides being provided elsewhere, though that presently doesn’t seem politically or legally likely.

Farther up the valley, beyond the reach of the dam lies an area of the park known as the “Grand Rapids of the Tuolumne River”, a backpacking destination that I hope I can visit someday. Backcountry wilderness trails crisscross the area to the north and south of Hetch Hetchy.

Crossing over the dam and through a tunnel blast into rock, a trail starts at the northern end of the reservoir heading along the west rim of the valley. The vegetation along the slopes is as much chaparral and shrub as forest, with manzanita, bay laurels, and oaks in abundance. At the four km point from the parking lot one reaches Wapama Falls which crashes down a steep granite face at the northern end of the valley. There are some pools near the base of the falls before it descends a bit further to reach the reservoir. Though not many plants are in bloom at this season in Yosemite, the rocky wetland gardens where the trail crosses the falls had a population of small attractive bright yellow flowers of the monkey flower genus Mimulus.

Wapama Falls on the north side of the Hetch Hetchy valley in the spring of 2011 (left) and fall of 2017 (right).

Flowers of Mimulus floribundus near
pools at the base of Wapama Falls.

Hetch Hetchy has been described as a companion valley to the much more famous and visited Yosemite Valley to the south. John Muir described it thus: “…it is a wonderfully exact counterpart of the great Yosemite, not only in its crystal river and sublime rocks and waterfalls, but in the gardens, groves, and meadows of its flowery, park-like floor”.

Views of the Hetch Hetchy Valley today from the north rim of the valley. At right
in center of photo is Kolana Rock.

Presently it is hard to gauge the original dimensions of the valley, but historical photos of the valley show its former glory. About 100 meters of water cover the valley floor currently. Taber’s historical photo from 1908 shows meadows (some perhaps actively grazed), wetlands, and a meandering Tuolumne River on the valley floor. Another photo taken a few years later farther up stream depicts the beautiful canyon and its forested and rocky slopes.

The Hetch Hetchy Valley in 1908 before dam construction. Wapama Falls can be seen at
center right in. Photo by Isaiah Taber, published in the Sierra Club Bulletin. Source.

Historical photo of the Grand Canyon of the Tuolumne River by F. Matthes of the USGS
in about 1914. The photo faces west towards the valley with Kolana Rock at center. Source.

Crossing over the dam to the north side of the reservoir, none of the information placards I viewed that are placed to inform the public show any such historical photos of what Hetch Hetchy looked like before its burial, something I note with some cynicism. With its swelling population and capricious annual precipitation, a reliable water supply is critical for California. However, there are alternatives to a dam at Hetch Hetchy, but like so many issues in conservation, the choice comes down to priorities and values. At a minimum we can strive to ensure that another decision like Hetch Hetchy is never made again in our most cherished national landscapes.

References

Wenk E. 2015. Wildflowers of the High Sierra and John Muir Trail. Wilderness Press, Birmingham, AL.

Worster D. 2008. A Passion for Nature. The Life of John Muir. Oxford University Press, New York, NY.

The O'Shaughnessy Dam as seen from the southwest
on the drive towards Hetch Hetchy Valley.

Yosemite V: To Nevada Falls

I’m not a fan of crowded trails, but the trail from Yosemite Valley up through Vernal and Nevada Falls is one of my favorite destinations in Yosemite National Park despite the swell of people it attracts.

Thankfully we started the hike early enough to avoid the swell. From the southeast corner of Yosemite Valley, the trail begins with a modest ascent towards the south and then to the east to gain a view of the Illilouette Valley. A footbridge across the Merced River offers the first glimpse of Vernal Falls in the distance to the east. A short while later one arrives at the southern side of the falls where there is a steep incline up the granite bedrock up to the top of the falls. In wetter seasons, Vernal Falls is a wide white ribbon that cascades over a sharp lip of granite, but at the tail end of a long dry season, the November falls were broken into three independent streams of water flowing down the rock.

Despite the diminished flow, Vernal Falls still seemed to have more water than some of the other waterfalls in the Valley, notably Yosemite Falls which was barely a humble trickle of water. I rather prefer to see Vernal Falls at this lower level of flow; the waterfall produced trickles and ribbons of water rather than a huge thunderous gush. The effect at the base of the falls is very different too since a full cascade of water produces so much spray that the trail becomes doused in mist.

Vernal Falls.

Nevada Falls.

At the top of Vernal Falls, the trail levels out to commanding views of the Illilouette Valley to the west, and the greeting of Emerald Pool, a temporary tranquil rest stop for Sierra snow melt before it plunges over the Vernal. The trail continues east and then crosses over the Merced River again back to its northern bank. Then the trail ascends steeply again in anticipation of reaching the top of Nevada Falls.   

Nevada Falls exceeds Vernal Falls in height, but the latter is more elegant in my opinion since it the sheer 90 degree drop at the crest of the falls results in an elegant plunge of water. At the head of Nevada Falls, the water seems to shoot out more forcefully where it then drops nearly vertically for some distance and finally hits a more sloping granite face where it slides further in sheets down the rocks. Anywhere else, a waterfall such as Nevada Falls would be the chief highlight of the area, but in Yosemite where there are an abundance of natural waterworks, one can be more choosy.

I hiked just a bit beyond Nevada Falls along the John Muir Trail where it heads into the Little Yosemite Valley and crosses into the Yosemite wilderness. Venturing a little off trail, I went just a ways up the eastern slope of Liberty Cap where there was an excellent view of the valley to the east. A pair of granite domes were visible some miles in the distance to the east. The domes appeared to be composed of sheets of granite, like Half Dome itself.  Where the sheets were partly broken, the laminar fractures produced dark shadows on the rocks. These patterns are one of my favorite manifestations of the diversity of granitic composition in the Sierra.

Panorama (looking east) of Little Yosemite Valley from the eastern slope of Liberty Cap.

The trail continues several miles to the summit of Half Dome and the broader Yosemite wilderness for overnight backpacking. Permits are required for both, and while both adventures sound very appealing, I’d prefer to find a time to when the crush of the crowds can be avoided. 

Sheets of water at the base of Nevada Falls.

Muir: advocate for the wild

At a bookstore in Portland in July I purchased a biography of John Muir by history professor Donald Worster. An excellent book, I gradually read it over the last few months. For a decade Muir has been a significant role model for me. My first substantive introduction to his writing was towards the end of graduate school when my mom bought me a book with a collection of his writings. Muir's romantically-infused view of nature, his attentiveness to natural history details, his wit regarding our own species, and his deep love of nature's beauty all resonate deeply with me.

President Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir at Glacier
Point overlooking Yosemite Valley in 1906. Image
in the public domain.

Muir is widely regarded as the godfather of Yosemite, of the National Park System, and of wilderness as a human value. He grew up in Scotland in a stern religious household, immigrated with his family to Wisconsin during childhood, and began to study science at the University of Wisconsin, though he did not complete his degree. The youthful Muir was an inventor and interested in mechanical innovation and efficiency. For instance, he built several versions of an alarm-clock bed that would rudely tip him to his feet at the appointed time early in the morning! His early career was spent in factories where his proclivity towards innovation bore fruit, but that left less time for indulging in his interests in science. An alarming accident in the factory that nearly blinded him helped him re-evaluate his life’s direction. Muir soon thereafter gave up factory work, moved to California – and scarcely giving any attention to the shiny city of San Francisco where his ship landed – headed for the Sierra Nevada.

Muir would end up spending years living in and exploring Yosemite and the nearby Sierra range. Though he lacked higher academic credentials, he would eventually help decipher from the rocks that the great valleys of the Sierra were formed by the slow action of glaciers, even though leading geologists of the time tended to favor other, incorrect theories. Muir also traveled beyond his beloved Yosemite to other regions of the west - to Mt. Rainier, to the Great Basin, and on seven different trips, to the recently acquired US territory of Alaska.

A panorama of forest in Sequoia National Park, August 2014. Crowns of giant sequoias (Sequoiadendron giganteum) in Muir Grove can be seen at top center. From a glacier to a wilderness area in the Sierra, to a beach, Muir has numerous natural landmarks named after him throughout the western United States.

Worster’s biography shed some light on aspects of Muir's life that I didn’t know or that I under-appreciated. By hard work and financial thrift, he gradually grew into a life of significant financial and social comfort by his later years. This was an interesting point of contrast for a man who was perfectly happy to sleep outside below the stars or who packed little but tea and bread for several days of wandering in the wilderness. In addition to his exploration throughout the western US, he also took several long international journeys (traveling to most continents) and he spent a significant amount of time in the deserts of the southwest, though he is mainly known as the patron saint of the Sierra. Finally, I learned that he actually camped with not one, but two, US Presidents who made visits to California (Roosevelt and Taft).

Muir's life was a celebration of nature, and on the time scale of history he had a tremendous impact on conservation and natural resource protection, but his life ended on a sad note. For years, he was involved with others in a political battle to save the beautiful Hetch Hetchy valley in Yosemite National Park from drowning under San Francisco's uncompromising push for urban growth and consumption. For a time it seemed that the proposed dam Muir strongly opposed would be put on hold for at least a generation, but in the end other political forces prevailed and Yosemite Valley’s northerly twin granite cathedral was allowed to drown to become a reservoir. The valley remains underwater today.

Muir epitomized aesthetic love of nature, but he was a pragmatist too and did not object to mankind’s use of natural resources or natural areas. His lifetime spanned a great period of technological and engineering advances (the mid 1800s to early 1900s), which perhaps accelerated the pace and degree to which human intervention in the natural world could leave lasting imprints. He was favorable to industrial advances, but he advocated for a much greater emphasis on conservation than most of his contemporaries. He didn’t see industrial or agricultural progress as an enemy, but rather recognized that true human progress depended on a deep reverence for, and sufficient protection, of nature. Today, he would likely be astounded at just how far humankind has impacted every ecosystem on earth, but perhaps he would also be relieved that his successors have set aside some of the most inspiring natural places as wildernesses and national parks.

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I stumbled upon Muir’s old mansion in Martinez, California inadvertently this summer while car shopping. Just off the highway, a National Park Service sign appeared across the road which marked the house and orchards where Muir spent the last decades of his life. It was originally owned by his father-in-law but eventually came to be owned by the naturalist. After an uneventful visit to the car dealership, we stopped at the visitor’s center and then toured the house and grounds.

The Muir mansion in Martinez, California. The photo at right is Muir's office, which he called his "scribble den".

The Muir-Strentzel mansion is perched on the top of a small hill. It is spacious with several stories, a large kitchen, a green-house like room on the east side of the building, and a small bell tower. There are fancy chandeliers. Muir had an office on the second floor across from his bedroom where a desk sat below windows that open up to the Alhambra Valley to the north. Here he worked on patching together old field notebooks and other scraps of text into the wonderful nature writing we have today.

Out on the grounds the fruit trees have been preserved by the Park Service, perhaps including some of the original trees that Muir, his family, and hired workers tended. He was a successful and hard-working business man, turning a good profit on the property. The mansion and grounds are not the expected scene of a lover of all things wild. Yet, down the slope from the house also grows a single tall Sequoiadendron giganteum specimen too, planted by Muir.

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Writing apparently came with great difficulty to Muir, though in books like My First Summer in the Sierra, I've felt his words flow with grace and ease. He frequently used superlatives, even religious language, to describe the landscapes impressed on his mind. To Muir, the geologic labor that built cathedrals like the Yosemite Valley was superior to anything humankind could construct. His early writings consisted of articles for periodicals published on both the east and west coasts. He was able to introduce the marvelous natural areas of the west to eastern readers who had never seen the less-densely populated areas of western North America. His books tended to emerge later in his life (or even shortly after his death); in some cases they were re-workings of his shorter essays.

A photo of Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park taken by Isaiah
Taber in the first decade of 1900s, before the valley was flooded. Image in
the public domain.

One of the refreshing hallmarks of Muir’s writings is his near complete avoidance of politics, and even of human actors and voices. He was intimately involved in the politics of conservation towards the end of his life, but that was a necessary evil to protect his beloved wild places, not a manifestation of a propensity towards the political life. Muir’s pen focused on nature, and if there is a lesson to be had from his approach for my own attempts to write about nature, it is the power of letting the organisms have the main voice in the narrative.

Muir had a profoundly different perspective on the natural world than many of his contemporaries, or even of many people alive today. As I came to the conclusion of Worster’s biography, it seemed to me that Muir's greatest concern over how humans interacted with nature was the inability of most to see beyond money. Such a narrow focus could afflict both the poor and the rich of his day - the rich because they were willing to sacrifice the irreplaceable beauty of nature for short-term monetary gain, and the poor because they were confined to a system that kept them focused on economic concerns for their very daily survival. Muir advocated for recognizing the true wealth of nature and its irreplaceable value to humankind. Nature is the wealth of eons of history, accumulated by slow but ruthless and elegant forces of biology and geology. Nature reminds us of what is insignificant and unimportant. Nature inspires our aesthetic and spiritual aspirations as a species.

“How fiercely, devoutly wild is Nature in the midst of her beauty-loving tenderness! – painting lilies, watering them, caressing them with a gentle hand, going from flower to flower like a gardener while building rock mountains and cloud mountains full of lightening and rain. Gladly we run for shelter beneath an over-hanging cliff and examine the reassuring ferns and mosses, gentle love tokens growing in cracks and chinks. Daisies too, and ivesias, confiding wild children of light, too small to fear. To these one’s heart goes home, and the voices of the storm become gentle. Now the sun breaks forth and fragrant steam arises. The birds are out singing on the edge of the groves. The west is flaming in gold and purple, ready for the ceremony of the sunset, and back I go to camp with my notes and pictures, the best of them printed in my mind as dreams.” John Muir, 20 July 1869, My First Summer in the Sierra.

References

Muir J. 1911. My First Summer in the Sierra. Penguin Books.

Worster D. 2008. A Passion for Nature. The Life of John Muir. Oxford University Press.

Yosemite IV: Glacier Point

Looking southwest into Tenaya Canyon
with Yosemite Valley in the distance.

I took a quick weekend trip to Yosemite this month. The waterfalls were full; the new foliage on hardwood trees was bursting forth like lime green jewels. There were two new destinations on this trip for me: a hike into Yosemite wilderness on the northwest wall of Tenaya Canyon and a drive to Glacier Point on the southern rim of Yosemite Valley. Both afforded incredible views of Half Dome, Tenaya Canyon, Yosemite falls, and the other gems lying at the heart of the park.

From atop Glacier Point it was easy to see how crowded and developed Yosemite Valley has become. Meadows, forests and the sinuous Merced River still occupy most of the valley floor, but the roads and clusters of cars are in plain view from above. John Muir described the view as follows: “From Glacier Point you look down 3000 feet over the edge of its sheer face into the meadows and groves and innumerable yellow pine spires, with the meandering river sparkling and spangling through the midst of them. Across the Valley a great telling view is presented of the Royal Arches, North Dome, Indian Canyon, Three Brothers and El Capitan, with the dome-paved basin of Yosemite Creek and Mount Hoffman in the background. To the eastward, the Half Dome close beside you looking higher and more wonderful than ever; southeastward the Starr King, girdled with silver firs, and the spacious garden-like basin of the Illilouette and its deeply sculptured fountain peaks, called ‘The Merced Group’; and beyond all, marshaled along the eastern horizon, the icy summits on the axis of the range and broad swaths of forest growing on ancient moraines, while the Nevada, Vernal and Yosemite Falls are not only full in sight but are distinctly heard as if one were standing beside them in their spray.” – The Yosemite, 1912. 

View from Glacier Point. Tenaya Canyon entering Yosemite Valley in the foreground. Half Dome to the right.

Left: Vernal Falls. Right: Yosemite Falls.

Western pearls

The Cascades and Sierras are like a string of pearls lying from north to south along the western edge of the United States: Mt. St. Helens, Mt. Hood, Crater Lake, Mt. Shasta, Tahoe, Yosemite, Sequoia. Over the last few years I have come to love these beautiful mountains. The white peaks of the Cascades are volcanic in origin and still active: the violent eruption of Mt. St. Helens in 1980 and the bubbling sulfurous mudpots found in Lassen National Park attest to this. Many of these mountains have a beautiful conical shape, like the revered symmetry of Mt. Fuji in Japan.

Mt. Lassen in northern California is the southernmost major peak of the Cascades. But topographically at least, the mountains continue to the south with the Sierra Nevada range. The Sierras tell a different geologic story than the Cascades. Some 250 million years ago, the collision of the Pacific and North American plates melted rock that formed under the ocean in plumes (1). These structures fused. Then about 80 mya, this massive chunk of rock pushed up through the ocean floor and carried the marine sediments that had been deposited on top. Asymmetrical uplift left the eastern side of the Sierras at a higher elevation, with a more gradual decline to the west. Subsequent erosion removed much of the marine sediment, and recent glacial activity carved elegant designs into the landscape such as the world-famous Yosemite Valley.

John Muir, the poet laureate of the Sierras, termed these magnificent mountains “the range of light”. In evangelical exuberance, which Muir used without hesitation in his description of wilderness, he described a view of Yosemite in the heart of the Sierras:

“It is easier to feel than to realize, or in any way explain, Yosemite grandeur. The magnitudes of the rocks and trees and streams are so delicately harmonized they are mostly hidden. Sheer precipices three thousand feet high are fringed with tall trees growing close like grass on the brow of a lowland hill …. Waterfalls, five hundred to one or two thousand feet high, are so subordinated to the mighty cliffs over which they pour that they seem like wisps of smoke, gentle as floating clouds, though their voices fill the valley and make the rocks tremble. … The mountains, too, along the eastern sky, and the domes in front of them, and the succession of smooth rounded waves between, swelling higher, higher, with dark woods in their hollows, serene in massive exuberant bulk and beauty, tend yet more to hide the grandeur of the Yosemite temple and make it appear as a subdued subordinate feature of the vast harmonious landscape. Thus every attempt to appreciate any one feature is beaten down by the overwhelming influence of all the others.” (2).

Just before the turn of the new year this winter, we took an adventure north to south down the eastern side of these magnificent mountains. We crossed the Cascades east of Eugene and once over the crest of the range, traveled from that point forward in high country on our trip to southern California. Passing through the Cascade Range in central Oregon, I was amazed once again by the dramatic shift in vegetation on either side of the divide. Dense coniferous forests with lush green understories dominate the western slopes of the Cascades, but the forests quickly change to drier, shorter and more open canopies vegetated by pines to the east. The change in forest type is, of course, driven by differences in precipitation on the eastern and western slopes. Storm clouds moving inland from the Pacific run into the mountains and dump most of their captive water before reaching the high country.

On this trip, it snowed briefly in southern Oregon near Chemult, but the skies lightened as we moved further south towards the Oregon/California border. In Modoc County (NE California), we entered the Great Basin floristic province. Here the vegetation became desert scrub peppered with juniper trees, the largest plants on the landscape. Small patches of snow remained on the ground. Our first significant stop was Lava Beds National Monument. The short winter day was drawing to a close but we explored two of the lava caves. They were cold wide shafts filled with rubble of very bland grey and pale colors; the caves relatively gradually descended downward into the earth. We saw no bats or other wildlife in the caves, but located some small ice sculptures adhering to the rocks below. The little sculptures were shaped like hemispherical ice cream scoops, having accumulated when water dripped from the cave ceiling above and apparently froze quickly as it flowed down the mound.

Visitors in a cave at Lava Beds National Monument

The next day, further south, the highway took us near Susanville and into Nevada for a time before crossing backing into California. We arranged for a stay in the small town of Bridgeport back on the California side of the border.

On day three we learned from a highway sign that several of the roads that traverse the Sierras that are typically closed to traffic during the snowy winter months were still open at this late season. This exciting news led to a quick decision to make a detour into the eastern end of Yosemite National Park. Access to Yosemite high country by car at this time of year was a real treat since National Park records indicate that Tioga Pass had not been open this late in the winter for at least the last 31 years! (3) Already at about 7000 ft elevation in the Mono Lake area, we made it up the pass to nearly 10000 ft towing our small rented trailer. Tioga Pass is a lightly vegetated gorge of granite and snow with strong winds that move down the canyon. On the less sun-exposed places to the south and deep in the canyon, ice froze in place to form suspended white and turquoise waterfalls.

Tioga Pass

At the top of the canyon, we encountered our first alpine lake (Ellery Lake), locked frozen into the mountains at 9538 ft. Further west into the park, we explored Lembert Dome, Tuolumne Meadows and Tenaya Lake. Near Lembert Dome, we took a hike through coniferous forest to Dog Lake. Like the other alpine lakes, this one too was frozen. We walked and shoe skated over the whitish-grey ice.

Dog Lake

In the afternoon we left Yosemite, heading back down Tioga Pass onto the east side of the Sierras in time for a sunset that painted clouds and mountainsides various colors. On day four we moved further south into the Owens Valley and started to encounter classic southern California desert habitat. Tufts of dried tumbleweeds were interspersed semi-regularly on sands and rubble on the grey landscape. Perhaps their phobia for neighbors was created by intense competition underground for the sparse water available in the desert. Here the landscape was open. Expansive smooth valleys were rimmed with tall mountains. The majestic granitic Sierras, light with snow cover rose, abruptly to the west from the valley floor. 

The Sierras from Owens Valley (Mt. Whitney is in there somewhere...)

The last day of our journey took us to Death Valley National Park and further south to the metropolitan expanse of southern California. Coming up towards the park, we saw Joshua tree sentinels on the landscape. We did not proceed deep into the park, but did drive through the Panamint Valley, an utterly barren swath of land set between the Argus Mountains to the west and the Panamint Range to the east. Though not hot on that late December day, one could easily imagine the searing heat of the landscape during the death days of summer.

Notes:

1. A concise history of Sierra geology.

2. Muir, J. 1911. My First Summer in the Sierra.

3. The road was finally closed on 17 Jan 2012. See the NPS data here.

Yosemite III: Hetch Hetchy

The O’Shaughnessy Dam, designed to provide water for the city of San Francisco, was in place by 1923 to drown the Hetch Hetchy Valley.  Before the valley was flooded, it was apparently comparable in aesthetic effect to the Yosemite Valley, though perhaps smaller in overall dimensions.  John Muir advocated hard to prevent the construction of the dam, but political pressures won out in the end and the valley became a reservoir.

Beautiful flowers of an array of colors were present on our mid-May hike.  Perhaps someday the valley will be restored.  It would then be many decades or centuries before the effects of the dam will no longer be apparent, but what an interesting experiment in ecological succession and restoration!

Yosemite II: The Falls

It has been a La Niña year, so winters in the northwest can be accompanied by higher than average precipitation. ENSO-linked precipitation trends are less clear for central California, but snowpack appears to be plentiful in the Sierras. During our visit, snow lingered in the Park above 5000 or 6000 feet elevation, though the California spring was well underway.  The numerous waterfalls around the Yosemite Valley were full, the water roaring onto the granite rocks below with a constant roar like soft thunder.  At Bridal Veil Fall there was so much water mixed into the air that the immediate area at the base of the waterfall had its own microclimate of soft rain.  In fact, up to about a half mile away from the falls, I could still feel the moisture in the air.  Vernal Fall, up the Little Yosemite Valley, presented a similar scenario.  Here the Mist Trail follows the southern bank of the Merced River from Yosemite Valley right up to the waterfall.  The trail then is composed of a long series of steep steps cut into rocky terrain leads hikers up behind Vernal Fall.  Here again, the volume of water was sufficient to greet visitors with a soft rain and make the steep granite staircase more dangerous.  I captured a beautiful rainbow made possible by the saturated air:

The upper and lower Yosemite Falls, together presenting a tremendous drop in water of over 2400 ft is probably the most impressive of Yosemite’s waterfalls to most visitors.  According to signage at the park, it is the tallest waterfall in the United States and fifth tallest in the world.  No doubt these waterfalls are beautiful and impressive.  I also enjoy smaller, more intimate, waterfalls.  At these waterfalls there is often opportunity to observe more closely the small moisture-loving biota like mosses and ferns that cling to life on the surface or cracks of bedrock.

Upper Yosemite Fall

Bridal Veil Fall



Staircase Falls



Nevada Fall

Yosemite I: Dimensions

Hoping to find some real spring weather in California, we left Oregon for a week of adventures down south.  This was our second visit to Yosemite; our first was during late November a year and a half ago.  Yosemite National Park is impressive partly because of its size.  Many of the natural features are of majestic dimensions in the park, from the numerous waterfalls to the granite precipices that form the walls of Yosemite Valley to the ancient giant sequoias in the park’s three groves.  It seems that everyone should leave impressed by these larger monuments of geologic forces and biological wonder.

The wonderful thing about nature in general is that beauty is present from the largest monuments of natural forces down to the smallest scales visible to the human eye.  Yosemite most impressively illustrates this principle.  Stately Pacific dogwoods and conifers are juxtaposed with both immense grey granite cliffs and soft blankets of small mosses and lichens on rocks.  There are cloud patterns in the sky, tree patterns on mountainsides, and rich patterns of bark ridges and valleys on the trunk of a single pine tree. From big to small, Yosemite is a treasure.