The Other 1,180 Square Miles

This one is about the rest of it. The parts I love that didn't make the Print.

Quick reference, if you're planning a trip

Best months. May and June for waterfalls at full roar. September and October for empty trails and cool air. February if you want the Horsetail Fall light, and be prepared for company.

Getting in. Five entrances. Big Oak Flat and Arch Rock from the west, South Entrance near Mariposa Grove, Tioga Pass from the east (closed most of the year by snow), and Hetch Hetchy, which is its own separate thing entirely.

What to bring. Layers, always. The valley floor and the high country are two different climates on the same afternoon. More water than you think. Real shoes if you're doing anything with elevation in it. A paper map, because service is unreliable and that is a feature.

Know before you go. Hetch Hetchy Road is open sunrise to sunset only and the gate locks. No dogs on trails anywhere. No swimming or boating at Hetch Hetchy. Waterfalls run on snowmelt and many are dry by August. Half Dome cables require a permit through a lottery.

The firefall, and what we do to the things we love

There are two firefalls and Yosemite is prickly about the distinction, for good reason.

The original one was entirely man made. Starting in 1872, the owners of a hotel at Glacier Point pushed a literal bonfire off the edge of the cliff every night. The embers pouring down the rock face looked like a waterfall of fire. There was a call and response, somebody in the valley at Camp Curry hollering up and somebody at the top hollering back, ending with the line: let the fire fall.

People came by the thousands. For most of a century.

And in January 1968 the Park Service killed it. The crowds were trampling the meadows to get a view, and it wasn't a natural event, and the director said the firefall was about as appropriate as horns on a rabbit. The last one dropped on January 25, 1968. It was winter, so almost nobody came to watch it end.

The park cancelled its most popular attraction because too many people came to see it.

The firefall people chase now is the real one, at Horsetail Fall, for about two weeks in mid to late February. The setting sun catches the water at the right angle and the whole fall glows molten orange for five to fifteen minutes. Rangers will not call it the firefall. Officially it is the Horsetail Fall phenomenon.

And nobody was going at all until a photographer named Galen Rowell shot it in 1973.

So: a photograph made this park protected, and a photograph made it crowded. I think about that every time I post something. I am not innocent in the machine I'm describing. I just hope that what I add is capturing the rare and fleeting moments that evoke feeling instead of driving influneer crowds.

Moran's thumbprint

I've written about Thomas Moran before and I will write about him again, so settle in.

He came to Yosemite in the autumn of 1872 with his wife, Mary Nimmo Moran, who was a serious artist in her own right and an etcher good enough that you should know her name and almost certainly don't. They sketched the valley together. Field work, quick and dirty, the way you do when the light is going.

There is a Bridalveil Fall sketch of his from that trip. Graphite and wash with white gouache. And down in the lower left corner he wrote, in his own hand, "Bridal Veil fall Yosemite Valley 900 feet." He stood at the base of that thing and took attendance. He turned that sketch into a finished oil painting in 1904. Thirty two years later. Thirty two years. I think about it every time I let a piece sit longer than I meant to, which is constantly. In 1887 he and Mary took a joint commission for a book called Picturesque California. He made an etching of Half Dome that ran as the frontispiece. She made an etching of a California forest interior based on one of his drawings. Husband and wife, one book, her plate built from his hand. I find that unbearably romantic.

But here is my favorite fact about any painting anywhere. Yosemite owns a Moran. The park museum holds his Bridalveil Fall from 1924, oil on canvas, thirty by twenty inches, donated by his daughter Ruth. He was eighty seven years old when he painted it. And when a restorer named Gustave Liljestrom worked on that canvas in 1951, his treatment uncovered something nobody had noticed in twenty seven years. Moran's signature. And his thumbprint. Pressed into the bottom corners.

That thumbprint is how they knew he had finished it.

An eighty seven year old man put his thumb in the paint of a Yosemite waterfall and it sat there unseen for a generation.

The manzanita, and what fire actually does

Manzanita has limbs the color of old brick, smooth and almost polished, and they twist like they've been thinking hard about something for a long time. Against gray granite the red is genuinely unreal. Once you notice it you cannot stop noticing it, and I have never been able to stop.

And it is built for fire. Most manzanita species carry a woody swelling at the base called a burl, and when fire takes the whole plant down to the ground, the burl sends it right back up. Some species skip the burl entirely and regenerate from seed after the flames.

The country up near Hetch Hetchy burned in the Rim Fire in 2013. The fire ran all the way to the edge of the reservoir. Driving through burned forest is a strange, wild, sort of holy experience. Black trunks standing in rows like a colonnade, and underneath them, everywhere you look, green.

Fire is not the end of that landscape. It's a chapter in it. These trees evolved with fire the way you and I evolved with sleep.

The morels are how I finally understood it. Morel mushrooms fruit in burned ground the spring after a fire, and my friends and I found them out there like the forest was throwing itself a party.

And the one I haven't done yet

The John Muir Trail starts at Happy Isles, right there in Yosemite Valley, and runs 211 miles south to the summit of Mount Whitney. Another 10.6 miles down the far side to reach the nearest trailhead, so call it 222 miles of actual walking and around 45,000 feet of climbing. Most people take twenty to twenty five days.

Partway along it walks straight into Kings Canyon National Park, which has almost no roads at all. There is no scenic loop to its heart, no overlook with a parking lot. The only way in is on your own two feet. Which means hardly anyone sees it. Which means the people who do are seeing something very close to what Muir saw.

It is on my list. It has been on my list for years.

Go past the front door

El Capitan and Half Dome have been painted and photographed more than nearly any rock on earth, and when you stand under them you understand why. They are staggering. They have earned every bit of it.

They are also the front door.

Behind them is a park with a grove Lincoln saved, a valley we drowned, a hundred switchbacks nobody climbs, riverbeds with no names, shrubs that need to burn to keep living, and a trail that walks out the back and doesn't stop for two hundred miles.

– Jessie