Yosemite’s Mariposa Grove to reopen
Popular attraction returns in June after $40 million renovation
Mariposa Grove, one of Yosemite National Park’s centerpiece attractions, will reopen to the public June 15 after a nearly threeyear, $40 million effort to restore the area’s natural tranquility and environmental health.
The grove, which is located near the park’s southern entrance atWawona and has receivedmore than 1 million visitors a year, includes roughly 550 giant sequoia trees, some of which are among the largest trees in the world, reaching 285 feet tall and 2,000 years old.
The area been closed to the public since July 2015 for a major renovation, which is nearly finished.
As part of a projectwhose costs were split equally by the park service and the nonprofit Yosemite Conservancy, based in San Francisco, workers have labored to return the area to a more natural state and reduce threats to the enormous trees.
Crews have torn up asphalt
pavement. They are rebuilding new hiking trails, planting native plants and constructing wooden boardwalks over sensitive wetland areas. Parks officials also are replacing old pit toilets with modern flush toilets, installing new interpretive signs and have removed the gift shop and tram rides, which featured chugging diesel trucks pulling wagons full of tourists within a few feet of the trees.
“This is a landmark project to restore an area of cultural and historic significance to Yosemite,” said Jamie Richards, a spokes- woman for the park. “We are working to create a more natural and enjoyable visitor experience. We hope when you walk through, it will be a peaceful and natural experience.”
The grove originally was supposed to reopen in late 2016. But massive winter snows last year buried the park and significantly delayed the work.
“It’s a very complex project with a lot of pieces, and there was a lot of snow in the grove and where we were going to put the new parking area, alongwith the leach field for the toilets,” Richards said. “We couldn’t do a lot of the construction until there was no snow on the ground.”
To visit the Mariposa Grove, visitors will park in a new 300-vehicle parking area at the park’s South Entrance and ride a free shuttle for two miles. Another 33 spaces will remain closer to the grove for disabled visitors, and visitors during off-peak times of the year when shuttles run less frequently.
Mariposa Grove is one of the park’s original landmarks. On June 30, 1864, while the Civil War still raged, President Abraham Lincoln signed a two-paragraph bill that changed America’s landscape forever. Inspired by the early photographs of Carleton Watkins and paintings by Albert Bierstadt, the measure set aside the granite cliffs and magnificent waterfalls of Yosemite Valley— as well as the ancient sequoia trees of Mariposa Grove, 35miles south — “for public use, resort, and recreation … inalienable for all time.”
Lincoln’s “Yosemite Grant Act” is widely seen as the birth of America’s national park system.
But more than a century of tourism has affected the big trees. Early promoters carved tunnels in several of them. One 227-foot tree, the Wawona Tree, where a tunnel had been carved in 1881, fell in 1969. Another, the California Tunnel Tree, whose passage was dug in 1895 as a novelty for stagecoach riders, is still standing. Visitors are allowed to walk through it.
Meanwhile, broad expanses of asphalt have put pressure on the trees’ shallow and wide-ranging root systems, scientists say. The pavement also has disrupted the natural flow of water to the trees’ roots.
“Sequoia groves are cathedrals. Providing a quieter, more relaxed experience in Mariposa Grove — no parking lots, no tram tours — will be much less chaotic,” said Mike Tollefson, former president of the Yosemite Conservancy, in an interview with this news organization in 2014 as the planning for the project was underway.
“Yosemite is a place to turn off your cellphone,” he said. “It’s a place where you aren’t in a hurry, where there’s not noise and you can contemplate nature.”