I can't help thinking that if the American West were discovered today, the most glorious bits would be sold off to the highest bidder. Yosemite might be nothing but weekend homes for Internet tycoons.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Yosemite has the most impressive and accessible granite big walls in the world. The rock is amazing. And because of that, it's been the mecca for climbing in the U.S. - and the world to a large degree - for all of climbing history. It's the place to test yourself against the historic routes of the past.
I am free to confess that I am disappointed with the Yosemite valley. It seems only about one-half as grand as the American Fork canyon.
Yosemite Valley is like a tourist zoo. It's shameful.
It is easier to feel than to realize, or in any way explain, Yosemite grandeur. The magnitudes of the rocks and trees and streams are so delicately harmonized, they are mostly hidden.
A perfect day would be to get into the car, drive out to Yosemite and go camping.
Marmite - like that other little black-jar job, Bovril - is so much a Mark 1 staple-of-Empire brand, so much part of the Edwardian world of enamel advertising signs, the history of grin-and-bear-it industrial food.
A few years after that first visit, I applied for a job in Yosemite.
At several such places we landed, but always found the ascent to the interior so covered with large loose rocks that it would have been impossible to have disembarked stores or stock on any.
A lot of people think that when you have grand scenery, such as you have in Yosemite, that photography must be easy.
Yosemite Valley, to me, is always a sunrise, a glitter of green and golden wonder in a vast edifice of stone and space.