Martin LeFevre: Yosemite Isn’t Disneyland

Yosemite Valley is essentially a half-mile to mile wide, and seven-mile long canyon between vertical granite walls rising 1000 meters or more from the floor. The living rock is as changeable in the light, and in the unimaginable span of geologic time, as the sand along the Merced River that runs through Yosemite.

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Even here, however, human activity and chatter are nearly non-stop. Probably everyone feels awe in Yosemite, but most feel it only in passing, on route to the next thing to do.

Camping in one of the 3-sided, canvas-topped units, it began raining after midnight and continued steadily all night—the first rain of the season. Mist and fog clung to the rock-face in the morning like thick gauze, rendering most of the 3000-foot wall invisible. The sky brightened, and the sun tried valiantly to burn off the fog, but clouds clung to the tops of the cliffs, and enshrouded Half Dome all day. Even so, it is a good day to be in Yosemite Valley.

Sitting in the sun by the languid Merced River while fog and clouds cling to the peaks and hollows of the rock face rising to dizzying heights before me, I realize without a shadow of a doubt that I’m in one of the most beautiful places in the world.

There is, however, a sorrow in being in such a spectacular place visited by so many people with a tourist mentality. One palpably feels in Yosemite what the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins called “the smudge and smell of man.” It’s not just ironic, it’s moronic that solitude and silence should be so hard to find in Yosemite Valley.

Two busloads of Japanese tourists, part of a California tour that had just taken them to Disneyland and Universal Studios, disembark with the enthusiasm of young children. They have the air of people trying to do so much in so little time, making them almost oblivious to the indescribable beauty of Half Dome, El Capitan, and the many other formations pressing down from thousands of feet above.

Some are holding plastic rice bowls from the food court, eating with chopsticks. Many of the men have big cameras slung over their shoulders, and many of the women are in heels and dress slacks, looking like they are going out for an informal evening dinner rather than taking the path up to Lower Yosemite Falls.

One passes dozens of people on the half-mile walk from the road into the falls. A few seem happy and are friendly, but most are glum, if not sullen. Fittingly, the awe-inspiring Yosemite Falls, which much of the year cascades 2400 feet in two sections over the lip of a cliff, throwing fine spray on the people at its base, is nearly dry. It literally looks like a trickle.

Even in the off-season one has to look hard to find the essence of Yosemite Valley amidst the vehicles and tourists from around the world. One can nevertheless find Yosemite a couple hundred meters from the buses, cars, and throngs, in the changing light on the sheer rock faces, and hear it in the music of the wind through the pines.

Few people know that running parallel to Yosemite, and only about ten miles from it is another canyon of equally incomparable beauty, according to America’s premier naturalist, John Muir. It’s long been under hundreds of feet of water, having been dammed in the early part of the 20th century to needlessly provide San Francisco’s drinking water, something Muir fought tooth and nail. Hetch Hetchy’s destruction broke Muir’s heart, and many believed it killed him in 1914.

With humankind fast approaching seven billion and exponentially growing, there will be fewer and fewer accessible sanctuaries of grandeur, silence, and solitude. Yosemite has not qualified as such a place for decades. A restored Yosemite and Hetch Hetchy should be designated the first World Spiritual Sites, with access limited to electric buses.

On our way out of Yosemite Valley, we stopped and walked into a meadow. Looking back across the stream of traffic at the base of El Capitan, we were overwhelmed by that sheer slab of granite rising thousands of feet from the Valley floor. Widespread reverence for the earth--putting the primary values of silence and solitude first--is the only thing that will save the earth from man.

- Martin LeFevre is a contemplative, and non-academic religious and political philosopher. He has been publishing in North America, Latin America, Africa, and Europe (and now New Zealand) for 20 years. Email: martinlefevre@sbcglobal.net. The author welcomes comments.

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