One day last summer in Yosemite the NPS collected footage from 30 people and folded it into one video. “How long does it take to see this park?” Now the answer is 14:53 seconds. The day includes time with a chatty ranger on horseback, a couple hang gliders into cluby music, a postmaster from Long Island, and a walk up the chains on Half Dome. If you’re not familiar with Yosemite Nature Notes, you have a lot of great park footage to catch up on.

A West Virginia man’s recent death was associated with the hantavirus outbreak in Yosemite’s tent cabins. Yosemite has since announced that up to 22,000 visitors may have been exposed to the virus, which is spread by mice. Yosemite’s contacted many of the people who could have been exposed, but about 2,500 of them live outside [ more... ]

Yosemite National Park Officials are asking tourists to come out to the park and pick apples from two of the park’s historic orchards. They run the program each year, picking apples near high-traffic areas in the hopes that eliminating the non-native food source will prevent bears from having run-ins with delicious humans. To me the [ more... ]

Voters in San Francisco will decide this fall whether to drain the 117-billion-gallon Hetch Hetchy reservoir that was damned in 1923. Naturalist John Muir famously campaigned for the city not to dam the site, which he said was one of the most beautiful areas in the world. That failed campaign was the start of the [ more... ]

In just 18 hours Alex Honnold soloed a link-up of Mt. Watkins, El Cap, and Half Dome. He free climbed 90% of it and aided the rest. Halfway up the Nose he met some climbers and borrowed one of their chalk bags, telling them he forgot his on the ground. This comes just days after [ more... ]

The Yosemite Conservancy’s webcams are challenging the New York hawks for nature webcam domination. The non-profit group posted the cams in Yosemite just in time for the spring snowmelt to capture all the waterfalls and bloom of green in the valley. As silly as it is to watch a webcam of a rock, I have [ more... ]

Tell your kid a lost Where’s Waldo poster has been unearthed and let him spend five days staring at this large version of a 1931 pictorial map of Yosemite. The poster was made by Joseph Jacinto Mora, who was a cartoonist for the Boston Herald before moving west to live in a Hopi village to [ more... ]

Filmmaker Shawn Reeder offers a poetic look at Yosemite and Sierra in another beautiful video that’s heavy on time lapse. Yosemite Range of Light is nice dose of nature on an office afternoon.

via Moldy Chum

A guide company in Yosemite looked at the lack of snow in the valley and decided to take a hike up Half Dome sans cables. Standing at the top they shot this short video panning the floor. At least the park service won’t have to worry about flooding when the snow begins melting this year.

A California congressman has called on an old law that requires San Francisco to “first fully develop and use other available water resources before it begins to export water it captures from the Tuolumne River.” Legendary naturalist John Muir called Yosemite’s Hetch Hetchy, “one of nature’s rarest and most precious mountain temple(s),” and he died [ more... ]