Yosemite Reservations

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TUOLUMNE MEADOWS LODGE AND GUEST SERVICES OPEN FOR THE 2008 SEASON
Delaware North Companies Inc.
5 June 2008
CurryVillage Recreation Center Also Opens River Rafting to Yosemite National Park Visitors
One of the most popular lodging facilities in the High Sierra will open for the summer season on Friday, June 6. The Tuolumne Meadows Lodge in Yosemite National Park will offer tent cabin accommodations and dining services to backcountry visitors through the first week of September. Since the Memorial Weekend opening of Tioga Pass on highway 120, the Tuolumne Meadows gas station, mountain shop, grill and store have all opened to park patrons.

The Tuolumne Meadows Lodge is anideal base camp for day hikes throughout the meadows area or overnight backpacking into the High Sierra. “Wildflowers we usually see in late-May and early-June are just now starting to bloom and many local streams are full to bursting, making this a great time to explore all Tuolumne Meadows has to offer,” said Colin Baldock, manager of guest recreation for DNC Parks & Resorts at Yosemite, the official park concessioner.

Situated in the largest sub-alpine meadow in the Sierra Nevada at an elevation of 8,775 feet, the Tuolumne Meadows Lodge has 69 canvas tent cabins that sleep up to four people per tent. Each canvas-covered unit is wood-framed on a cement platform and equipped with beds and linens, candles for lighting, and a wood-burning stove. Central shower and restroom facilities are nearby. Rates are $82 plus tax, per night (double occupancy), with additional adults $10 and children $6.

Tuolumne Meadows Lodge serves hearty, breakfast buffets and family-style dinners in a central dining tent beside the Dana Fork of the Tuolumne River. Advance dinner reservations are required and may be made by calling 209-372-8413. Guests may also order box lunches at the front desk the night before needed. To make lodging reservations, or for more information regarding area services and attractions, call 801-559-4949 or visit http://www.yosemitepark.com/

DNC Parks & Resorts at Yosemite also announced the opening of their rafting operations, commencing on Friday, June 6. Located in the Curry Village Recreation Center, the Raft Stand provides guests with rafts, paddles and mandatory personal flotation devices for a leisurely, three-mile float on the Merced River through the heart of Yosemite Valley.

The family-friendly rafting activity offers unique views of park icons Half Dome, Sentinel Rock, Glacier Point and Yosemite Falls. “When you’re floating down the Merced River, you can’t help but smile,” said Sean Costello, manager of the Curry Village Raft & Bicycle Stands. “It’s perhaps the most peaceful and relaxing way to see Yosemite’s spectacular scenery.”

The Curry Village Raft Stand opens daily at 10am and the last raft is rented at 4pm. Guests are advised to arrive up to an hour earlier than their projected launch time. Minimum weight is 50 pounds, strictly enforced to protect children from swift and cold water. Rates are $20.50 for adults and $13.50 for children ages 12 and under. For further information, call 209-372-8341 or visit http://www.yosemitepark.com/ ( http://www.yosemitepark.com/ ).

The Tuolumne Meadows Lodge and the Curry Village Raft Stand are operated by DNC Parks & Resorts at Yosemite, Inc., an affiliate of Delaware North Companies and the authorized National Park Service concessioner overseeing lodging, dining, commercial guest recreation activities, retail gift and grocery stores, and transportation services in Yosemite National Park.

SCENIC YOSEMITE ROAD SET TO OPEN IN TIME FOR MEMORIAL DAY
Associated Press
20 May 2008
YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK, Calif.—Yosemite National Park officials say the highest elevation route through the Sierra Nevada is scheduled to reopen for all vehicle traffic in time for Memorial Day weekend.
Tioga Road is one of Yosemite National Park’s most scenic drives and a popular east-west crossing of the Sierra Nevada. It will open beginning Wednesday.
Campgrounds, a general store and gas station along the stretch of Highway 120 won’t open for a few more weeks, but bathrooms will be available starting this week.

The road is closed much of the year due to heavy snowfall and the threat of avalanches. Summer visitors typically use the road to enter the park from the east and to head toward the Tuolumne Meadows area from Yosemite Valley.
Park officials say the cables on Half Dome are also now up for the season.

WHAT ADAMS SAW THROUGH HIS LENS
Louise Story
27 April 2008
New York Times
Wawona Tunnel is a passageway from civilization to natural splendor. The tunnel, dug through a hill on the south side of Yosemite National Park in the 1930s, hides the coming view like a mile-long blindfold.
And then you’re there. Pale, curvaceous granite rocks dance in the skyline. Dozens of people stand along the edge of the pull-off, called Tunnel View, trying to capture the scene. Some snap two quick shots with disposable yellow cameras, and others set up their tripods for hours, watching the light strike Yosemite’s monoliths. On the left, El Capitan, a rock climbers’ mecca, appears the tallest. The Half Dome and Sentinel Dome arch upwards in the center. And the two Cathedral Spires sit on the right next to the sometimes gushing Bridalveil Fall.
Many people know these sights by name, but more know them by sight alone, as captured through the lens of the legendary American photographer Ansel Adams.
Adams first visited Yosemite in 1916 when he was 14 years old. On that trip, he hopped up on a tree stump to take a photo of Half Dome, then stumbled, headfirst, and accidentally pushed the shutter release. The upside-down image remained one of Adams’s favorites, he wrote in his autobiography.
The park itself also remained a favorite. Adams ended up living much of his life in Yosemite, and took many of his most well-known photographs there. Today, it is not unusual to encounter professional photographers and novices alike trying to retrace his path. They wait for the perfect minute of moonrise over Half Dome or a shadow on a fallen tree in Siesta Lake. They remember his photo of a juniper tree they saw in a museum, on a coffee cup or a monthly calendar. Ansel Adams’s work, in some ways, is the best unpaid advertising a national park could get.
The first step on an Ansel Adams-inspired trip to Yosemite is to visit the gallery run by his family. It is in the park’s central area called Yosemite Valley, and displays and sells Adams’s work as well as photos taken by several contemporary artists. Before Adams died in 1984, he spent years living in a house behind the gallery and leading workshops there. Now others teach the workshops, and the gallery is managed by Adams’s grandchildren. The gallery’s staff leads free camera walks three days a week. The gallery also shows a free film about Adams once a week, rents out cameras and tripods and sells keepsakes and guidebooks.
I ordered three books written by Adams from the gallery’s Web site before my trip: Adams’s autobiography, his collected photos of Yosemite and a step-by-step explanation of some of his works called “Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs.” By the time our plane landed in Fresno, Calif., I felt well-equipped to step inside Ansel land.

But Yosemite does not often appear as it did at the moments Adams tripped his shutter. Nor is it easy to stand where he stood and capture the same images.
“I’ve had people say they are kind of disappointed,” says Glenn Crosby, the curator of the Ansel Adams Gallery. “They only know the park through Ansel’s eyes, and he was only showing you the keepers. The park is not always as dramatic as his work.”
Back in 1986, Mr. Crosby was working at a job he didn’t like with too long a commute. So he moved to Yosemite to take photographs for a year and has stayed there ever since. He likes to say he has his own “Moonrise and Half Dome” because in 1998 he photographed the rock with an astronomer who had tracked the exact minute the moon would ascend next to Half Dome in the same way it did in front of Adams in 1960. But as talented as Mr. Crosby is, he says he doesn’t fool himself.
“Someone could be standing shoulder to shoulder with Ansel and come away with a totally different interpretation,” he says.
Once a week, Mr. Crosby takes a handful of people into a backroom at the gallery for a free show of original Adams photos (hint: pre-register). Recently, Mr. Crosby showed visitors Adams’s 1927 photo called “The Diving Board” (which includes Adams’s future wife, Virginia Best, standing on a distant rock) and his 1921 picture “Lodgepole Pines, Lyell Fork of the Merced River,” among others. He handles the photos carefully with white-gloved hands, since the prices for rare prints are as high as $40,000.
“We’re a gallery,” Mr. Crosby says. “We’re not a museum.”
The gallery has been in the family since 1902, when James Best, a local painter, won the rights to sell his work there. Ansel Adams married Virginia Best, James’s daughter, in 1928, and the family still holds the concession license. In the 1970s, Ansel’s son, Michael, renamed the gallery after his father.
Ansel Adams’s family members today say they feel a responsibility to provide education and service.
“We offer a connection to Ansel for people who love Ansel and this park,” says Matthew Adams, president of the gallery and grandson of the photographer.
By the 1950s, Adams had already taken most of his famous Yosemite images. Not unlike tourists today who visit his tripod points, Adams packed up his two teenage children, wife and a couple of burros in 1952 to recreate some of his earlier treks. For 10 days, they hiked through the backcountry of Yosemite, past Merced Lake, Vernal Fall and the peak that would be named Mount Ansel Adams in 1985. It had been decades since Ansel had been to some of those spots, but without hesitation he scrambled up on ledges and visualized new images, recalls his son, Michael Adams, who was 19 at the time.
“He loved the scenery as it was at the time,” says Michael Adams. “Whether it was dead trees or trees that were alive. Or whether the waterfall was full or down. It wasn’t always the big vistas, it could be a wonderful rock.”
Visitors to Yosemite should come with the same openness to appreciating the scenery as it is, rather than expecting to see the living version of Ansel Adams’s pictures. The Jeffrey pine that Adams photographed atop Sentinel Dome in 1940, for example, fell a few years ago, and it is now a rotting log.
Adams was often frustrated with the development of the park during his long life there. When he was young, he felt as if seeing others in the wilderness was “an intrusion or even trespass” and wrote many letters to the national park service bemoaning the commercialization of Yosemite.
But he outgrew the desire for privacy in the park. “Nature is always better when left to itself — but for what purpose?” he wrote. “Starry-eyed reaction to the splendors of nature is an invaluable experience for everyone.”