Sunday, July 26, 2026 · From the Nature Notes archive Every issue of Yosemite Nature Notes from 1922 to 2003 is now readable on this site: 512 issues, about 1.87 million words, written mostly by rangers and seasonal naturalists who were standing in the park when they wrote it. This week we pulled the late-July issues. Six of them have something useful to say about the park you would walk into today.

1. The Merced is a garden right now, and it closes in a week Richard J. Hartesveldt, a ranger naturalist, spent part of the summer of 1953 wading the Merced in a bathing suit and tennis shoes, "for the sake of one's feet," cataloging the flowering plants that live in moving water. Nobody looks at them. Fishermen don't, he noted, because in a mountain stream they are barely cover for trout.

The one he liked best was the floating-leaf pondweed, or floating brownleaf, whose broad ovate leaves hinge to long slender stems and whose flowers push just far enough above the surface to be pollinated by wind. He gives the address: the south side of the river, a few hundred yards upstream from Sentinel Bridge. Early in the summer the current carries the leaves as far downstream as their stems will allow.

Then the line that makes this a late-July item rather than a June one: "Most of this colony is high and dry by the first week in August."

You have about a week. Wade in with something on your feet.

Source: Yosemite Nature Notes, July 1953 (Vol. 32, No. 7), "Flowers of the Merced's Flowing Water."

2. Seven trees on one rock Ranger-naturalist Ernest A. Payne wrote up Lembert Dome in July 1938 as a correction to the obvious reading of it. The dome, he says, "thrusts its bald pate above the verdure of Tuolumne Meadows," and a visitor is meant to dismiss it as barren. Payne counted seven conifer species on it and allowed that there may be more.

Lodgepole pine, which owns the meadow. Mountain hemlock in numbers near the talus on the northwest side, every size from first-year seedlings to old patriarchs. Western white pine on the northwest shoulder, which in the summer of 1937 hung in clusters of golden-rust cones. Whitebark pine, scattered near the summit, distinguishable from the lodgepole by counting needles per bundle: lodgepole two, whitebark five. Sierra juniper, "misshapen, distorted," which he rates one of the best things on the Sierran skyline. Red fir on the east slope.

And a Jeffrey pine near the top of the south shoulder, not three feet tall, "struggling with its feet deeply embedded in a crack in the solid granite," gnarled enough that Payne read real age into it. He compares it to the dwarf conifers gardeners train for temple courtyards, one produced by nature and one by control.

All seven are cone-bearing. No broadleaf tree grows on the dome at all.

The summit is about 800 feet above the meadow floor. Check road status on The Park Bulletin before you plan around it.

Source: Yosemite Nature Notes, July 1938 (Vol. 17, No. 7), "Trees on Lembert Dome."

3. A test for the night sky, from 1948 F. Robert Kirschman, a museum assistant, opened his 1948 piece with a complaint that still lands: visitors are impressed by the daylight and miss the nights.

His argument was technical. Atmosphere, not glass, is the limit. Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles had a fine 12-inch Zeiss refractor and had to run it at 125 diameters because the air over the city would not support more. In Yosemite, he wrote, you could push a good 3-inch portable past that, and a 3-inch was within reach of an ordinary amateur.

Then the part you can use without owning anything. Kirschman reports splitting Epsilon Lyrae into a double with his unaided eye, both at Tenaya Lake and in Yosemite Valley, "a feat usually considered possible only with optical aid." It sits right next to Vega, which is high overhead on a late-July night. If you can separate it, the air above you is genuinely good.

He spent that night on the northeast shore of Tenaya. Venus and Jupiter came out "like two great jewels," doubled in the water. Before dawn, Orion.

Source: Yosemite Nature Notes, July 1948 (Vol. 27, No. 7), "Stars Over Yosemite."

4. The great gray owl and the man gathering bark for the Firefall Ranger-naturalist Cope Jensen drove Valley to Glacier Point on a July day in 1931 and wrote down everything that moved. Deer all along the road. Five four-point bucks at Peregoy Meadows. A weasel crossing with a chipmunk held head-up, moving in a gallop.

A few miles past Bridalveil Creek came the find. A great gray owl, flushed by Don Butterbaugh while he was gathering red fir bark for the Firefall at Glacier Point. It went behind a clump of firs and that was all they got of it. The species had not been reported there in four years, and Jensen notes it was near that same ground, per Grinnell and Storer's Animal Life in the Yosemite, that the great gray owl was first found nesting south of Canada in 1915, at 7,400 feet, within a mile south of Ostrander Rocks.

Read that sentence again for what it takes for granted. The Firefall ran on red fir bark, and somebody's job was to go get it.

The rest of the drive dates just as hard. Two mother "hold-up" bears with two cubs each between Ostrander Rocks and Washburn Turn, "exceedingly tame and quite aggressive in their quest for candy and cookies," and thin for it, Jensen thought, or because of it. A gray fox with a bad hind foot at the garbage pits a mile from Glacier Point.

The owl is still there. The Firefall, the hand-fed bears, and the garbage pits are not.

Source: Yosemite Nature Notes, August 1931 (Vol. 10, No. 8), "Motoring to Glacier Point with a Naturalist."

5. Trailitis, 1935 Helen K. Sharsmith and Jane Morton McIntire diagnosed themselves in July 1935 with "an acute attack of trailitis," brought on by "a prolonged, incautious, and injurious perusal of the topo map." Treatment was four days into the Ten Lakes Basin with food and sleeping bags on pack frames and no stock, which they defend on the grounds that burros force you to fix an itinerary in advance.

They went up the Yosemite Falls zig-zags, a day and a half up Yosemite Creek canyon, over the divide into the Grand Canyon of the Tuolumne, then Ten Lakes to the South Fork of Cathedral Creek, around Tuolumne Peak at 10,000 feet, and down to May Lake. That last stretch was a new trail, unfinished and unsigned when they walked it, and easy to follow anyway.

The detail worth keeping: on the climb out of Cathedral Creek they found raindrop craters in the trail dust, and the only prints in it were a bear's. No human tracks at all. At the high pass, in the shadow of Tuolumne Peak, a pika came out and worked a few feet from them.

They report the cure only partly took. "The chronic ailment still persists in insidious form."

Source: Yosemite Nature Notes, July 1935 (Vol. 14, No. 7), "Trailitis: A Cure."

6. One hundred years ago this Friday The issue dated July 31, 1926 turns a century old on Friday. Two things in it.

An unsigned note, initialed H. C. B., reports a deer count on the Glacier Point road as far as Bridalveil Creek on the Fourth of July. Morning run, 5:30 to 8:00: twenty-seven deer, including a doe with two fawns two or three days old, and almost no bucks. Evening run, 6:00 to 8:00, same road: fifty-four, with the antlered bucks now showing. The does had moved to the meadow edges and the big bucks were in the chinquapin brush on the ridges.

Two counts, one road, one day, and a two-to-one difference. The finding is about when you drive, not how many deer there are.

The issue opens with Joseph Grinnell's creed on wildlife administration, reprinted from Science. Point three: "I believe it is unwise to attempt the absolute extermination of any native vertebrate species whatsoever." That was a position that needed arguing in 1926.

Source: Yosemite Nature Notes, July 31, 1926 (Vol. 5, No. 7).

Three things to do with this week Get in the Merced upstream of Sentinel Bridge before the first week of August, and look down instead of up. Find Vega after full dark and try Epsilon Lyrae with your eyes only. It is a fair test of the air. Drive a road twice in one day, early and late, and count what you see. H. C. B. got a two-to-one spread on one stretch of road in a single day.

The full archive is at www.thetalusfieldjournal.com. It is searchable by year and volume, it is free, and none of it was written to sell you anything.

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