Yosemite’s Majesty

John Muir, who founded the Sierra Club and gloried in nature’s wonders wherever he found them, once described the Sierra Nevada as “the range of light.” Painters and photographers have found in this light the full range of color that man can only imitate, and the subtle tints that are light itself, which man may never capture.

Nowhere is the magic of light more dramatic than in Yosemite National

Park. It became a national park in 1890. Yosemite Valley, which had been a state park, was added to the federal park in 1906. The more than 1,200 square miles of waterfalls, granite monoliths and awesome panoramas have inspired poets, painters and photographers for more than a century.

When the ancient glaciers ground out the canyon of the Merced River, they carved through the weaker granite and bypassed the harder prominences of El Capitan and Cathedral Rocks. This left Yosemite Valley sprinkled with wildflowers, oak woodlands and conifer forests of ponderosa pine and Douglas fir, all of it in the closed hands of the towering granite walls.

Ansel Adams, the nature photographer, felt at home here, capturing the endless images of strength and fragility, of depth and light, especially the storms that sweep the mountains and suddenly darken the grandeur of the valley.

Every season reveals its own secrets of beauty: the still, snowcapped mountains in the winter, the gushing waterfalls in spring, the flame and the rust of autumn, the frolic of wildlife and the verdure of summer, and always the incredible freedom of light.