INTRODUCING ... THE NEW YOSEMITE!
A $40 million restoration project at Mariposa Grove, home to more than 500 giant sequoia trees, is set to be unveiled Friday
YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK >> After being closed to the public for nearly three years, Mariposa Grove, the storied forest of giant sequoia trees at Yosemite National Park first set aside for protection by Abraham Lincoln, is set to reopen Friday morning following completion of a $40 million restoration project.
The massive reddish-brown trees, located near Yosemite’s southern entrance, have awed visitors for 150 years. The grove’s sequoias are among the largest living things on earth, reaching up to 285 feet tall, with bark more than a foot thick and dating back 2,000 years.
But crumbling asphalt pavement, aging pit toilets, traffic jams and a diesel tourist tram tarnished the area. The restoration project, the largest in park history, aims to restore natural serenity and take pressure off the massive trees’ fragile root systems while also improving the flow of water to help the forest thrive in generations to come.
“We wanted to make it a more tranquil experience,” said Frank Dean, president of the Yosemite Conservancy, a San Francisco environmental group whose donors provided $20 million toward the project, with Yosemite officials providing the rest.
“It had been compromised,” said
Dean, a former Yosemite ranger of the grove. “These trees are super-resilient. But we don’t want them to fail on our watch. This area has continued to be chipped away at with the best of intentions. What we’re doing is correcting for the sins of the past.”
This week, the only sounds in Mariposa Grove were the chirping of birds, the winds rustling branches and the babbling of nearby creeks. What had been a 110-car parking lot is now a forest floor. Pit toilets built 50 years ago have been replaced with a gleaming new restroom with flush toilets and tile work.
Crews built 4 miles of new hiking trails, constructing wooden boardwalks and bridges over sensitive wetland areas. And they planted thousands of native plants, including lupin, wild strawberries, and near the streams, willows, sedges and dogwood.
New interpretive signs explaining plants, animals and human history have been installed. And gone are the gift shop and tram rides, which featured chugging diesel trucks pulling wagons full of tourists within a few feet of the trees.
An area that once housed a diesel fueling station and tram equipment now frames a breathtaking entrance.
“We wanted people to arrive and be inspired,” said Sue Beatty, a Yosemite restoration ecologist who has worked for years on the project.
Starting at 9 a.m. Friday, they will arrive differently than in the past.
Before, cars drove into the grove. When the 110-space lot filled, as it often did on summer weekends, rangers would turn vehicles back.
Now, visitors will park in a new 300-vehicle parking area at the park’s South Entrance and ride a free shuttle for 2 miles that runs every 10 minutes. Another 33 spaces will remain closer to the grove for disabled visitors and for visitors during off-peak times of the year when shuttles run less frequently.
It will be the first shuttle-only access in Yosemite. Other parks, including Denali in Alaska and Zion in Utah, have required them for most visitors for years. With 1 million visitors a year to Mariposa’s giant sequoia grove, buses were the best option to remove the cars from around the trees, park officials said. A hiking route to the grove along the Old Washburn Trail will open later this summer.
Mariposa Grove is one of Yosemite’s original landmarks. On June 30, 1864, while the Civil War still raged, President 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, 35 miles 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.
“The historical significance of the Mariposa Grove cannot be overstated,” said Yosemite spokesman Scott Gediman. “This was the first time a government anywhere in the world set aside land for preservation.”
Naturalist John Muir, who founded the Sierra Club and helped preserve Yosemite in the 1800s, called giant sequoias “nature’s forest masterpiece, and so far as I know, the greatest of living things.”
But generations of tourism harmed the big trees. Early promoters carved tunnels in several of them. The 227-foot-tall Wawona Tree, where a tunnel had been carved in 1881, fell in 1969. 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, asphalt pavement put pressure on the trees’ shallow and wide-ranging root systems, scientists say. The pavement also disrupted the natural flow of water to the trees’ roots.
A study funded by the Yosemite Conservancy found that 81 percent of sequoia saplings grow within 100 feet of wetlands — a connection that was not previously known, and one that helped drive the design of the new trails and boardwalks.
“By removing the asphalt, we improved the hydrology of the grove,” Beatty said. “How can we help improve the trees’ survivability in times of a changing climate? A lot of the actions we took were to increase the resiliency of the giant sequoias.”
The project also was modeled on a similar restoration at Sequoia National Park, where crews removed cabins, autos and food vendors from the Giant
Grove and other key areas between 1997 and 2005. Construction workers there tore out 282 buildings, 24 acres of asphalt, dozens of manholes, sewer pipes, propane tanks, even telephone wires and light fixtures that had been attached to live trees for decades. Food service and overnight facilities were relocated outside the groves. Visitors now ride shuttle buses to access many of the most sensitive areas.
The Mariposa Grove project is the latest renovation at the park funded by the Yosemite Conservancy. The group has raised $119 million over the years to refurbish Lower Yosemite Falls, Tunnel View, Glacier Point, Olmsted Point and other iconic park locations, often in the classic 1930s national park style of granite stonework and timber beams. The conservancy hopes to begin construction this fall on a $13 million restoration of the Bridalveil Fall area in Yosemite Valley, with a new parking lot, modern flush toilets, interpretive signs and wider hiking trails with wooden boardwalks.
“The park has its budget, but it can’t get everything it needs from Washington, D.C.,” Dean said. “There’s an old proverb: If you want to go fast, go alone. But if you want to go far, you go together.”