Book Description

Excerpt from Yosemite and Its High Sierra This new edition of "Yosemite and Its High Sierra" is much more than a reprint. The text has largely been rewritten, with regard to the increased facilities for visiting and exploring the Yosemite National Park, and to its fast-growing need for modern roads. An improved map of the Park showing roads, trails and landmarks; a road map showing approaches to the Park, and upwards of fifty new illustrations, have been added. Credit to each photographer is given in the table of illustrations on pp. 11-15. In expanding the fifth chapter, I aimed to give the reader some idea of the extent and beauty of the highland forests, with a representative collection of tree pictures, especially of the Sequoia giqantea. The final section, "Notes," offers suggestions for brief trips to the great features of the Valley and its immediate upland. This condensed guide I hope will prove helpful to the time-short visitor. I have felt it a duty of every lover of Yosemite Valley to protest against the impending ruin of its especial beauty through Congressional neglect. Since the creation of this National Park thirty-one years ago, the Government has confined its provision for travel to and within the Park merely to taking over and maintaining inadequate roads built by private corporations. In most cases, these have not even been made fit for motor traffic. The need of roads out of the famous little Valley, which would lead the increasing throngs of summer vacationists to the broad and inviting upland near by, has long been urged upon Congress, but without result. This need became imperative when the Park Administration took the desirable step of admitting automobiles to the National Parks. Yosemite travel at once multiplied, and the already overcrowded state of the Valley is seen in Superintendent Lewis's report showing that room had to be found in the public camping grounds on the Valley floor last summer for twenty-five thousand campers. The State of California is soon to build the last link in a great highway, skirting the Merced up from the hot San Joaquin country to Yosemite Village. This done, the tide of visitors will become an inundation, making Valley conditions unsanitary and destructive, unless Congress acts without further delay. The thousands for whom Yosemite Valley would be unspeakably impoverished by the loss of its flower fields and the mutilation of its forests should ask of Congress the immediate adoption of Mr. Lewis's program for road betterments and construction in the Yosemite Park. This edition owes much to co-operation of Government representatives. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.