One of the coolest stops on our California tour: here’s what to expect
Yosemite National Park is absolutely amazing—so beautiful that when we started thinking about which places to include in our California road trip, there was no way we could leave it off the itinerary.
If you’ve never been there, you have no idea what you’ve been missing.
But let’s fix that right now.
Check out this article about Yosemite National Park and, when you’re done, read through the plan for our California itinerary: it’ll be one of the wildest experiences of your life.
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Your little lesson is back again: what you never wanted to know about Yosemite National Park
Yosemite Park is huge—actually bigger than some European countries, like Luxembourg! Just think: it covers an area of about 759,000 acres.
But how much is an acre, really?
Honestly, we couldn’t really tell you. It’s one of those bizarre units of measurement used by English-speaking countries just to be different—something only they use while the rest of the world ignores it. We genuinely tried to figure it out, but after reading online that “an acre is equal to one chain by one furlong” (yes, that’s actually what it says), that absurd explanation gave us a headache and we gave up.
Anyway, the story of this incredibly cool park began about 10 million years ago, when the Sierra Nevada started to rise up and “crumpled” the surrounding landscape, creating a mix of canyons and slopes that we can still admire today.
Then, about a million years ago, the real stars entered the scene: glaciers! These frozen giants carved and shaped Yosemite Valley, creating the breathtaking views that make it one of the most beautiful natural parks in the world.
So yeah, that’s just a tiny summary of how the area was formed. Since we like you, we’ll stop here and spare you a deadly geology lecture.
A look at Yosemite’s biodiversity
With almost 95% of the park designated as wilderness, Yosemite boasts a huge variety of plant and animal species that create a truly unique ecosystem.
Among the flora, the undisputed stars of the park are the giant sequoias, massive trees that can reach 100 meters in height and live for more than two millennia! One of the most famous in Yosemite is the Grizzly Giant—a seriously badass name that tells you exactly what we’re dealing with: a mega-tree over 60 meters tall and around 3,000 years old.
Sure, there are plenty of other trees too—pines, firs, willows, poplars, and so on. But the sequoias steal the show from everyone else.
The wildlife is just as impressive in terms of variety! In Yosemite, you’ll find more than 400 animal species, including deer, opossums, bobcats, cougars, black bears (which actually almost always have brown fur—go figure), coyotes, hares, and lots of other mammals.
And then there are reptiles, birds, insects... basically, wildlife is everywhere you look.
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The coolest places to visit in Yosemite National Park
So far, so good—but if you’ve decided to visit Yosemite National Park, you probably want to know what the park’s main attractions are, right?
Here they all are!
El Capitan
No, we’re not talking about a Mexican lucha libre wrestler or the latest reggaeton star. El Capitan is a beast of a rock formation, a granite monolith rising more than 900 meters with an almost vertical face that’s every climber’s dream (or maybe nightmare).
It seems Mother Nature created it specifically for extreme sports lovers. In fact, base jumping was born following jumps made from the top of El Capitan by the father of the sport, Carl Boenish.
Half Dome
Rome has its big dome; Yosemite has its “half dome.” Lucky them. Actually—lucky us?
Half Dome is incredible! It’s a giant rock forming the summit of a mountain nearly 1,500 meters high, with a unique appearance visible from almost anywhere in the park. Its shape—bet you’ll never guess—is that of a half dome.
Around 1870, American geologist Josiah Whitney described the rock as “utterly inaccessible.” Mountaineer George Anderson, however, must not have gotten the memo, because just five years later he took a little stroll through Yosemite National Park and climbed Half Dome, reaching the summit like it was no big deal and making poor Josiah look pretty foolish.
Yosemite’s waterfalls
There are about a dozen throughout the park, each more beautiful than the last, and in spring they put on their best show.
The coolest of them all, in our opinion, is Horsetail Fall. More than 600 meters of waterfall split into two drops, which in February puts on a spectacular show: the setting sun hits the water in such a way that it creates red-orange shades, making it look like a stream of lava!
Mariposa Grove
We already told you that sequoias are among Yosemite’s main stars, so we can’t leave out Mariposa Grove, a forest home to many of these green giants.
The Grizzly Giant is one of them, but if you explore the area you’ll find many more, like the California Tunnel Tree—cut through at the base to allow passage like a tunnel and the only living sequoia in the world with this feature—and the Washington Tree, the largest in all of Mariposa Grove.
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