Yosemite National Park

Yosemite National Park, established in 1890, protects a spectacular slice of California's Sierra Nevada, famous above all for Yosemite Valley — a glacier-carved gorge walled by sheer granite cliffs like El Capitan and Half Dome and laced with some of the tallest waterfalls in North America. The valley's scale and beauty helped launch the entire idea of preserving wild land for the public, championed here by the naturalist John Muir.

Beyond the famous valley, the park sprawls across more than 1,100 square miles of the high Sierra — alpine meadows, polished granite domes, and groves of giant sequoias, the largest living things on Earth. Glaciers sculpted nearly all of it, leaving the U-shaped valleys and rounded domes that define the landscape. Most of its roughly four million yearly visitors crowd into the valley, leaving the vast high country relatively quiet.

• California
  The most populous U.S. state, admitted 1850 located in
• The Sierra Nevada
  California's great granite mountain wall part of