At the start of the tour
Welcome to Yosemite Valley loop
Welcome to Yosemite Valley. This tour makes one loop through the valley: from Tunnel View, in along the Merced River to the heart of the valley, and back out again to Valley View, with six stops along the way.
Long before it had its modern name, the people who lived here called this valley Ahwahnee, which the park translates as a gaping mouth-like place. They called themselves the Ahwahneechee. People have lived in and around this valley for thousands of years, and today seven traditionally associated tribes and groups have ancestral connections to the park. Some of their members still gather in the valley for ceremonies.
The valley's written history is much shorter, and it moves fast. In 1851, a state-sponsored militia became the first outsiders to enter it. Thirteen years later, in the middle of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Yosemite Grant, protecting this valley and the Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias for public use. It was the first time the United States government set land aside for its scenery. In 1890, Yosemite became the country's third national park.
Here's how this works. I'll tell you a story on the way to each stop, and another when you get there. In between, I'll stay quiet, so you can enjoy the valley.
Point 1 · At the stop
Tunnel View
This is Tunnel View, one of the most famous views of Yosemite Valley. Visitors have been stopping at this overlook for more than seventy-five years.
Take it in from left to right. The great granite wall on the left is El Capitan. Far off at the head of the valley, the rounded rock with the sheer face is Half Dome. On the right, Bridalveil Fall drops beside Cathedral Rocks, and Sentinel Rock rises farther along that same side of the valley.
The shape of the valley tells you how it was made. Rivers first cut a narrower, V-shaped canyon here. Then, over the last few million years, glaciers flowed down from the high country again and again, and widened and deepened it into the U shape in front of you, with steep walls and a flat floor. The side valleys were left hanging high above that floor, and their streams now pour into the valley as waterfalls. Bridalveil Fall is one of them.
This overlook sits at the east end of the Wawona Tunnel. Work on the tunnel began in January 1931, and it opened to traffic in June 1933. Crews used about two hundred thirty tons of dynamite to bore nearly a mile through solid granite, and its design is considered significant in the National Park System and on the National Register of Historic Places.
Near the overlook there's a bronze model of the valley that you can touch. The park says this view is at its most spectacular at sunset, or just as a storm is clearing. So take your time here, because everything else on this tour lies down there on the valley floor, beneath these same granite walls.
Point 2 · At the stop
Bridalveil Fall
This is Bridalveil Fall. From the parking area, a paved trail climbs gently to a viewing area right at the base of the fall. It's about half a mile there and back, and about halfway up there's a wheelchair-accessible viewing platform.
In spring the fall thunders, and the spray can be so strong that you may not be able to reach the end of the trail without getting soaked. The rest of the year, look for its light, swaying flow. This is an often windswept waterfall, and the wind moves it across the face of the cliff.
The fall is framed by two great rock formations, Leaning Tower and Cathedral Rocks. Its creek comes out of a hanging valley. The glaciers in the main valley were thicker and more powerful than the ones in the side valleys, so they cut much deeper. When the ice melted, this creek was left at the lip of a cliff, and it has been falling from there ever since.
The most recent glacier in Yosemite Valley, about twenty thousand years ago, reached roughly as far west as this fall, and filled about two-thirds of the height of these cliffs.
Before you go up, a word of caution. The boulders along the creek are treacherously slick, and the water is swift and very cold, so stay on the trail and behind the barriers. In winter, the trail itself can be icy and very slippery.
History, on the way there
On the way: Sentinel Bridge
Next, we're heading to Sentinel Bridge, in the middle of the valley, and the story of how this place became a tourist destination almost overnight.
In 1855, only four years after the valley's people had been forced out, a man named James Hutchings led the first known tourist party into Yosemite Valley, on horseback. He went on to promote its scenes of wonder and curiosity in his own California magazine, and a steady stream of visitors followed, on foot, on horseback, and later by stagecoach. In 1856, the first lodging built for tourists opened here, the Lower Hotel, with extremely modest, barn-like rooms.
The newcomers changed the valley quickly. They built bridges and ran ferries across the river, and charged travelers to use them. They staked claims to land taken from its Native residents. They fenced and plowed the meadows for hay, grazed their stock, and planted more than a thousand apple trees, some of which still grow in the valley today. Hotel owners even cut a swath through the trees so their guests could see Lower Yosemite Fall.
Some people worried about where all this was heading. A steamship captain named Israel Ward Raymond and Senator John Conness pushed Congress to protect the valley, while artists and journalists carried its image to the rest of the country. The result was the Yosemite Grant of 1864, which gave the valley to the State of California on the condition that it stay protected for public enjoyment. Its first appointed guardian was Galen Clark, who served several terms over more than twenty years.
Protection didn't stop the visitors. It sealed the valley's future as a destination. The first stage roads arrived in 1874 and 1875, and from 1858 to the present day, eighteen hotels and inns have been built in different parts of the valley.
Point 3 · At the stop
Sentinel Bridge
This is Sentinel Bridge. The view upstream from the stone bridge is one of the most photographed in the park: Half Dome at the head of the valley, and very often its reflection in the river below. The reflection is clearest when the water is low and still, in fall and winter. Near sunset, the face of the dome can glow a reddish orange in the last light, the alpenglow that photographers gather here to wait for.
Half Dome rises nearly five thousand feet above the valley floor, to about eight thousand eight hundred feet above sea level. Despite the name, there was never a matching other half. Its granite formed about a hundred million years ago, deep underground. A large vertical fracture gave the glaciers a weakness to work on, and as they scraped past, they undercut the base until slabs fell away, leaving the sheer face. The rounded top was never covered by the ice. It was shaped instead by exfoliation: slabs peeling away in curved layers, like the skins of an onion.
An 1865 report called Half Dome perfectly inaccessible, a summit that never would be trodden by human foot. Ten years later, a man named George Anderson reached the top, and the route he laid became the forerunner of the cables that hikers climb today.
From the parking area, you can also see Yosemite Falls across Cook's Meadow. And the quiet water under this bridge has a wilder side. On January 2, 1997, the Merced became a raging torrent, and in the center of the valley, the floodwaters were more than ten feet deep. It was the most damaging flood in Yosemite's recorded history.
History, on the way there
On the way: Yosemite Falls
Next, we're heading to Yosemite Falls, known to the valley's first people as Cholok.
The falls have a link to one of the best-known names in American conservation. In 1869, the innkeeper James Hutchings hired a young woodcutter named John Muir to rebuild and run his sawmill, near the foot of the falls. For almost two years, Muir milled trees that a storm had blown down, to build improvements for Hutchings' hotel. During his years in Yosemite, Muir became an outspoken champion of America's wild places, and his activism helped make Yosemite a national park in 1890.
Point 4 · At the stop
Yosemite Falls
This is Yosemite Falls, one of the tallest waterfalls in North America. It's really three falls stacked together: the upper fall, fourteen hundred thirty feet; the middle cascades, six hundred seventy-five feet; and Lower Yosemite Fall, the final drop of three hundred twenty feet. Altogether, two thousand four hundred twenty-five feet of falling water.
Yosemite Creek is fed entirely by snowmelt. At its peak in late spring, about twenty-four hundred gallons a second pour over the lip of the upper fall, and the falls can be twenty times louder than they are in autumn. By late summer the creek often runs dry, until the storms of late fall bring it back. In winter, spray from the upper fall freezes into a cone of ice at its base that can grow more than three hundred feet tall. And on some clear nights in April and May, when the flow is high and the moon is full, the mist can catch the moonlight in a moonbow.
The creek didn't always fall from here. Long ago it cascaded down the steep ravine to the left of the upper fall. Then, about a hundred thirty thousand years ago, a retreating glacier left a ridge of rock and debris, a moraine, that blocked that channel and turned the creek straight off the cliff. A geological accident made one of the tallest waterfalls on the continent.
A paved, one-mile loop trail leads to the base of the lower fall. Stay on the pavement there: above the footbridge, the boulders are slippery even when they're dry, and the park says that leaving the trail in that area often leads to serious injuries. In spring and early summer, standing on that footbridge near the base, you can expect to be sprayed by the falling water.
History, on the way there
On the way: El Capitan Picnic Area
Next, we're heading to the picnic area beneath El Capitan, one of the most famous big walls in the world of rock climbing.
That story starts close to here. Across the road from the Yosemite Falls parking area is Camp 4. In the middle of the twentieth century, rock climbing wasn't yet a mainstream sport, and the walls of this valley became the place where its new styles and techniques were born. In the 1940s and fifties, climbers like John Salathé, Royal Robbins and Warren Harding pioneered first ascents of the valley's great walls, including Sentinel Rock and Half Dome. Beginning in the 1950s, and for decades after, climbers lived at Camp 4 for long stretches, often with little money and few belongings, putting everything into training and into new, harder routes. In 2003, Camp 4 was listed on the National Register of Historic Places for its role in the development of modern rock climbing.
The big wall era began in 1957, with the Northwest Face of Half Dome. A year later came the great wall ahead of us, by a route called the Nose. That first ascent took forty-seven days of climbing spread over seventeen months, with a hundred twenty-five bolts and other aid. In the decades that followed, climbers moved to removable gear that didn't scar the rock the way hammered pitons had.
Point 5 · At the stop
El Capitan Picnic Area
This is the El Capitan Picnic Area, just to the east of the great wall. It rises about three thousand feet above the valley floor, and in spring, early summer and fall, climbers come from all over the globe to climb it. Look closely at the rock and you may spot them, tiny figures on the gray granite. After sunset, their headlamps scatter across the face before they settle in for the night, and they can look like stars.
Part of what makes the wall possible is the rock itself. The park describes this granite as very strong, with few fractures, and if you look at the face, you'll see it isn't one color. It's a patchwork of lighter and darker rock, from different kinds of magma that cooled deep underground.
The Ahwahneechee name for this rock is Tutokanula, and it comes with a story from the time of the animal people. Two bear cubs fell asleep on a large flat rock near the river, and while they slept, the rock grew, until the cubs were scratching their faces against the moon. Their mother called on all the animals to rescue them. None of them could, until the lowly inchworm crawled slowly all the way to the top and led the cubs safely down. The rock's old name is the inchworm's name.
In winter, look for Horsetail Fall on the east side of the wall. It flows from about December to April, and in mid to late February, at sunset, it can glow orange, as if it were on fire. And each year from March to mid-July, some climbing routes in the park close to protect nesting peregrine falcons, birds that disappeared from Yosemite in the 1940s and came back with the help of biologists and climbers.
History, on the way there
On the way: Valley View
Next, we're heading to Valley View, the last stop of the tour, near the western end of the valley, and the story of why the valley floor is so flat.
During the great ice ages, the glacier in this valley was once more than five thousand feet thick. It buried everything you can see, except the top eight hundred feet of Half Dome and the top of Eagle Peak, just west of Yosemite Falls. Where the granite was cracked, the moving ice tore it away and carried it down the Merced River canyon.
When the climate warmed and the ice pulled back, it left a dam of rock and gravel across the western end of the valley, and a shallow lake filled in behind it. Meltwater poured in tons of rock, gravel, sand and silt, and slowly the lake filled up, becoming bogs and marshes, and finally meadows. The bedrock floor that the glaciers carved now lies nearly two thousand feet below the surface.
The meadows that grew there are shrinking. Over the last hundred fifty years, the valley's meadows have gone from more than eight hundred acres to fewer than four hundred, as pines and cedars moved in from the edges. For thousands of years, lightning fires swept through, and the valley's Native people set low, gentle fires of their own to tend the land. Then the newcomers put out every fire for more than a century, until the 1970s. Today, crews bring prescribed fire back to each meadow every five to eight years, to feed the soil and clear out the young pines.
Point 6 · At the stop
Valley View
This is Valley View, the last stop of the tour. Look back up the valley, and you have most of it in one frame: El Capitan, Sentinel Rock, Cathedral Rocks and Bridalveil Fall, with the Merced River in front of you.
The glaciers finished their work here long ago, but the river hasn't. It keeps moving sand and gravel down the valley, cutting new bends and abandoning old ones, and every so often it floods. In January 1997, floodwaters spilled into this parking area, up to six feet deep.
It's a good place to think about how many ways this valley has been seen. To its first people, it was home, the place they named Ahwahnee. To the first tourists, it was a scene of wonder and curiosity. John Muir called it the grandest of all the special temples of Nature he was ever permitted to enter. And since 1864, it has been protected for everyone, including the people who haven't come here yet.
Before you go, stay well back from the water. The current is swift and very cold, and in spring it can be deadly. Thank you for taking this tour of Yosemite Valley. The tour is complete, and the view is yours for as long as you'd like to stay.