Outside's Ultimate Yosemite National Park Guide

Above, an early morning view of Yosemite Valley. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

Summer vacation season is only a little over four months away and one of the most popular places to visit is Yosemite National Park in Central California.

For those contemplating a vacation at Yosemite, an "ultimate guide" to the park has been posted by Outside magazine's website that may prove to be useful, particularly for those visiting for the first time.

They begin it with:

It’s no exaggeration to say that some of the most formative outdoor experiences of my adult life happened at Yosemite National Park in California. It’s where I went backpacking for the very first time (and where I learned that you do not, in fact, need to haul along a full-size pillow and roughly ten pounds of Swedish Fish in order to survive). It’s also where I completed my first multi-pitch climb, saw my first bear, and dug my first cathole (necessary after viewing my first bear). I even completed my first long-distance hike, a two-month stint on the Pacific Crest Trail, which meandered through the park’s Tuolumne Meadows, where Alex Honnold offered me a wave from one of his famous paws as he loped off into the woods. 

Climbing superstars aside, Yosemite is one of the most—if not the most—iconic national parks in the United States. It’s a perpetual bucket-list topper for good reason. Yosemite features some of the world’s tallest granite walls, a parade of thundering waterfalls, and colossal domes and peaks carved in part by the ferocious power of ancient glaciers and volcanoes. It teems with wildlife, from fuzzy little pikas to majestic (and endangered) Sierra Nevada bighorn sheep. And it plays with extremes, resting at around 1,800 feet elevation at its lowest point and rocketing to more than 13,000 feet at its highest—the glacier-draped Mount Lyell.

But for all that magic, Yosemite also gets a bad rap for being overrun with tourists. (Reality check: unless you live there, you’re also a tourist.) The thing is that while the popular Yosemite Valley draws crowds year-round, it’s actually incredibly easy to find solitude in the park—after all, the Valley occupies only a tiny slice of Yosemite’s nearly 760,000 acres, almost 95 percent of which are designated wilderness. 

Though the framework for this park was established in 1864, when President Abraham Lincoln signed the Yosemite Grant Act, these vast lands have a much longer human history, one that you should learn before setting off for adventure. The same actions that reserved this park for the public also forced out its original inhabitants, who included the Ahwahneechee, Me-Wuk, Mono, and Paiute peoples; their ancestors still hold deep ties to the area today. Consider reading Mark David Spence’s Dispossessing the Wilderness for crucial context on some of the more unpleasant history behind Yosemite’s formation and that of several other national parks.

To read more, go here.