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It is not generally known that the Yosemite Valley is a very small part of the Yosemite National Park. Nearly all visitors to Yosemite are surprised to learn that the Park embraces over eleven hundred square miles of territory.
To those who are at all interested in nature the woods and streams of the Park present a fascinating study. To the naturalist they will reveal a wealth of forms, in fact, out-door scientists of almost every kind find the area a particularly fortunate spot for the pursuit of their studies. Within its boundaries are to be found more than
eighty species of animal life, over two hundred different varieties of birds, about twelve hundred varieties of ferns and flowering plants, thirty-five species of trees, including three groves of the giant sequoia, or "Big Trees," ten varieties of trout, twenty-one species of reptiles, eleven different varieties of amphibians or batrachians, and a myriad of insects. Throughout the region the legibility of the records left by the glaciers and other tools used by nature in forming the continent is a source of unending interest to geologists.
However, despite its size, one of the charming features of this playground is the easy accessibility of its higher reaches. Leading from the Valley are easy trails up which the out-of-doors devotee may strike into a mountain land of surpassing grandeur and charm. A land sprinkled with park-like glades, dotted with lakes of exceeding beauty so numerous as to preclude the possibility of distinguishing them by name, watered by sparkling streams that are the children of mountain glacier and eternal snow, and whose banks are often wholly hidden in luxuriant masses of fern and flowering growth of many kinds and colors, clothed with endless forests of magnificent trees, and blessed with an enchanted climate.
Just to have seen the Valley, to have stood in the awe inspiring and thought inducing presence of its combination of majesty and loveliness, is itself satisfaction, but to wander through the higher reaches, to stand in the mighty shadows of the heaven reaching mountains, to climb into their embrace, to penetrate into their intimate
recesses, to know their flower-strewn glacier-chiseled canyons and granite cradled lakes, to stand upon their bare, ice-bound summits and hold communion with the sky is an unforgettable experience.