Yosemite’s granite cliffs and waterfalls proved so overwhelming to early visitors that the valley became, in 1864, the first landscape in American history to be set aside by federal government specifically for preservation and public use, a grant signed by President Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War that predated the establishment of Yellowstone as the first true national park by eight years, and effectively planted the seed for the entire concept of national parks as we understand it today. Yosemite itself was not formally designated a national park until 1890, following a determined advocacy campaign led substantially by naturalist John Muir, whose writing about the valley helped convince Congress of the need for stronger federal protection than the earlier state-managed grant provided.
Yosemite Valley was carved by glaciers over millions of years, the ice sheets grinding through existing river valleys to leave behind the sheer granite walls, including El Capitan and Half Dome, that define the park’s dramatic scenery today.
A Valley Long Home to the Ahwahneechee People
Yosemite Valley was inhabited for centuries by the Ahwahneechee, a Miwok people whose name for the valley, meaning place of the gaping mouth, was later anglicised into Yosemite itself, and whose forced removal in the 1850s during California’s brutal gold rush era preceded the valley’s eventual protection by only a matter of years. This displacement, largely omitted from early park mythology centred on untouched wilderness, has been more directly acknowledged by the National Park Service in recent decades as part of a fuller account of the valley’s actual history.
Yosemite Falls, the tallest waterfall in North America at 739 metres including its cascades, often dries to a relative trickle by late summer, its flow dependent almost entirely on seasonal snowmelt from the surrounding high country each spring.
Painting a Valley Carved by Ancient Ice
Yosemite’s sheer granite cliffs and cascading waterfalls give a watercolourist dramatic scale and powerful natural form to work with. We’ve captured that character in our own Yosemite Watercolor Print, painted first by hand and printed to order on archival paper, a small piece of California for a wall at home.
The valley that first convinced a nation to protect its own landscapes, Yosemite remains the place the entire idea of a national park effectively began.