This October, we stayed at the Curry Tent Cabins (wood floor, canvas walls) on the valley floor. It was crowded. I like to say about Yosemite that all you have to do is look up and the people melt away. It is pretty stunning scenery and there’s just no getting around the immensity and beauty of Half Dome and El Capitan. However, Yosemite (like The Grand Canyon) has become a small city. With so many visitors, there are the attendant administrative challenges, even during an off-week in October. Lots of linens to be washed, hot water for showers, food, moving people around. Like the stages of death and dying, I went through denial, anger, sadness, etc as we navigated bunches of teenagers on organized camping trips, crowded shuttles, and lines for food at the Seven Tents Pavilion, where you can “enjoy hearty meals and our famous pizza after your day of adventure in Yosemite.” All I can say is the food was more convenient to obtain than the indigenous people’s diet of deer, fish, birds, acorns, berries, and pine nuts. I noticed fewer actual American citizens visiting the Park than Asians, East Indians, and Europeans. I heard that Japanese worker employee rewards programs include the choice of a trip to either Yosemite, Las Vegas, or The Grand Canyon. I saw hardly any Africans or African-Americans.
The late movie actor John Wayne famously said “I don't feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them, if that's what you're asking. Our so-called stealing of this country from them was just a matter of survival. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.” Today, we are more aware of the history and drama behind the “Western Expansion” and the notion that the land was uninhabited when the White Man arrived in the Ahwahnechee or Awani ancestral home of Yosemite to claim it under Manifest Destiny. The U.S. federal government evicted Yosemite Native people from the park in 1851, 1906, 1929, and finally 1969. I recommend the book An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, which discusses how North America in 1492 was not a virgin wilderness but a network of Indigenous nations, people of the corn. Rebecca Solnit in Sierra Club Magazine said it well: “The first European Americans to venture into the North American continent understood that they were entering someone else's homeland, that these places were fully inhabited and known. They knew that they were invaders, partly because they fought to dispossess Native Americans. But that reality got buried, and it was lovers of the beauty of the American landscape who reimagined the whole continent before 1492 as an empty place where, as the Wilderness Act of 1964 puts it, "the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.””
That said, I gotta hand it to Theodore Roosevelt and political will it took - after a famous camping trip with naturalist/environmentalist/(maybe racist?) John Muir in 1903 - to establish a number of national parks and monuments and what eventually became a centralized National Park Service. For its time, it was a pretty enlightened move to protect land from development, and whether it’s luck or forward thinking, there will be no large-scale development in Yosemite Valley. If you get off the main roads and do some hiking, the number of people goes down exponentially. The world is a crowded place, and solitude is a luxury - both the actual cost to get and stay there and the intangible cost of peace of mind and quality of life. Does watching a travelogue or documentary fill the need? Maybe, if there are no other options. But, whether you have the privilege of getting away or you find yourself in a crowd - in Yosemite or anywhere - remember to look up.
