A recap of things we saw, heard and did in the park last month, from our El Portal office to you. Here’s what happened in August…
• We have to start with the big 1-0-0: The 100th birthday of the National Park Service, on Thursday, August 25. We celebrated by watching the Mariposa Symphony Orchestra in a live-streamed performance at Glacier Point; listening to the ever-inspiring Terry Tempest Williams; toasting the occasion at a sold-out event at Anchor Brewing in San Francisco (thanks to our friends at Huckberry for donating proceeds to support the park!); and counting down our top 10 ways to #FindYourPark in Yosemite.
• During a birthday breakfast celebrating the centennial, we cheered the winners of the inaugural Yosemite Partnership Award, designed to honor NPS and Conservancy staff for “exemplary cooperative achievements.” The recipients — Yosemite’s Kimball Koch, a historical landscape architect who has helped with Conservancy-funded projects such as the restoration of Mariposa Grove; and the Conservancy’s Valley Complex Supervisor Olotumi Laizer, who has helped establish a sister-park relationship in Tanzania and is known for his “kind demeanor that calms the summer frenzy of the visitor center” — earned enthusiastic applause from the 400 park and partner employees in attendance.
• If you’ve stopped to check out some of Yosemite’s northern giant sequoias this August, you might have come across the three interns who are spending their summer working on grant-funded research and restoration efforts in Tuolumne and Merced Groves. In addition to supporting a seedling recruitment study, the intrepid trio has helped remove a total of 20 social trails in the two groves, and have helped restore trees vandalized by eco-graffiti.
• August was a busy time for field work in the park! Next up, another trio … of floral updates!
So far this season, NPS crews have worked with more than 50 volunteers to treat at least 26 acres of invasive plants as part of a donor-funded project to restore and protect alpine meadows. Focusing their efforts at elevations above 7,000 feet, the teams have also surveyed more than 1,500 acres to document new populations of non-native plants.
Through another Conservancy grant, crews are studying the footprints of 14 different fires to find flora blooming in burned areas. So far, they have mapped 222 acres of rare and special-status “fire-following” plants.
We worked in and around Cook’s Meadow to help plant around 1,000 native plants, including milkweed, yarrow and deer grass, alongside NPS staff; Youth in Yosemite participants and program leaders (at the tail end of a three-day youth summit); and 25 Capital Group employees who spent a weekend in the Valley through our corporate volunteer program. The multi-day collaborative effort was part of broader grant-funded project to improve habitat for pollinators.
• Our Outdoor Adventure guides led a bevy of backpacking trips full of fascinating naturalist facts…
During a geology-focused trek to Mt. Lyell, participants saw evidence of recent donor-supported trail work in Lyell Canyon and, higher up, a shifting landscape. Traces of last winter’s snow are still obscuring the margins of what was Yosemite’s largest glacier, but the icy remnant clearly continues to shrink.
To the north, two groups headed Mono Pass to search for endangered Sierra Nevada bighorn sheep with help from expert biologists — and, with the help of high-powered spotting scopes, successfully set eyes on the elusive mammals.
And at the east end of the Valley, one Half Dome-hiking group saw restored vegetation in the Vernal Fall spray zone; met a ranger who started out as a Yosemite Leader Program participant at UC Merced; and helped haul out trailside litter, including gloves discarded at the base of the cables. On another trek up and down that world-famous feature, one of our naturalist guides, Jon-Paul, went out of his way to help a nervous young hiker make a successful descent. Both trips highlighted the many roles our donors, staff, guides and volunteers can have in the park — or, as the hiker’s family explained in a letter thanking Jon-Paul for his help, that “the whole of what you do is greater than the sum of the parts.”
• Finally, we closed out the month by asking our social media fans to share photos that fit the theme #MySierraSummer — stay tuned to see some of the submissions featured on our blog, and follow us on Instagram for more fun contests.
We kicked off September by marking the Wilderness Act’s 52nd birthday (Sept. 3), but there are still plenty of exciting occasions coming up this month, including Yosemite Facelift (Sept. 20-25), the annual volunteer clean-up event put on by the Yosemite Climbing Association, National Public Lands Day (Sept. 24), and the anniversary of the first all-female ascent of El Capitan (Sept. 25). With autumn just around the corner, we’re looking forward to capturing seasonal shifts in expert-led art workshops and spending a crisp almost-fall evening learning about Yosemite’s bats.
See you in the park, and thanks for reading!
