1864 A star is born
For the first time, the federal government protected scenic lands for posterity when President Abraham Lincoln signed legislation creating the Yosemite Grant.

1868 Yosemite gets a little brother
When the University of California was created by the Organic Act, State Geologist Josiah Whitney saw an opportunity for sibling symbiosis between Yosemite and the University. Data collected by University scientists and students in the canyons, meadows, and forests of the gigantic outdoor lab of Yosemite would be housed in University collections, and the University would publish Yosemite-related science—giving the nascent University academic street cred. Today, a multitude of UC collections and museums embody Whitney’s vision of UC as home to Sierra collections—including the Lowie Museum of Anthropology (now the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum), Bancroft Library, Jepson Herbarium, and the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology. Throughout the 20th century, research conducted by the likes of botanist Willis Jepson, zoologists Joseph Grinnell and Starker Leopold, forester Harold Biswell, and plant pathologist Daniel Holmes influenced environmental policy, not just in the Sierra but also in ecosystems around the country.

1870 A professor meets a sawyer
Professor of geology Joseph Le Conte travelled with a group called the “University Excursion Party”—including one-quarter of the University’s total enrollment—across the Central Valley and into Yosemite, all on horseback, tin pans jangling all the way. At Sentinel Dome, nine days into the five-week trip, Le Conte wrote, “Such a sunset I never saw; Such a sunset, combined with such a view, I had never imagined.” On his fifth day on the valley floor, Le Conte met “a man in rough miller’s garb, whose intelligent face and earnest, clear blue eye, excited my interest” at the foot of Yosemite Falls. The next day the man, John Muir, joined the group as a guide. Muir and Le Conte became lifelong friends.

1873 Yosemite pines travel
Jeanne Carr, a self-taught botanist, early Yosemite explorer, and wife of the University’s first professor of agriculture, Ezra Carr, planted Yosemite pinecones in Berkeley. “On the highest point of the grounds, but not the driest, I have put as tenderly as carefully as ever I put my babies in their cradles... thirty species of cone trees,” she wrote to her close friend John Muir. Where exactly Carr planted the Yosemite pines remains a mystery, but it is assumed that they would not have thrived in an East Bay habitat.

1892–93 Sierra Club and UC Press launch
Joseph Le Conte and his son, “Little Joe,” an avid mapmaker and mechanical engineering professor, joined John Muir as charter members of the Sierra Club. That same year, the Sierra Club published the first issue of its Bulletin (still alive and kicking as part of Sierra magazine) and UC Press launched, subsequently publishing Sierra-related research by faculty in geology, anthropology, botany, economics, engineering, geography, history, linguistics, and zoology. Le Conte the elder served on the Sierra Club’s board of directors until 1898, and Muir was its president until he died in 1914. Little Joe led the club’s map-making efforts and succeeded Muir as president.

1901 What a way to go
The night before the Sierra Club’s first High Trip, Joseph Le Conte died of a heart attack in camp on the valley floor. His friends honored him with LeConte Memorial Lodge, a library and education center built near where he died that remains in operation today.

1903 The president pays a visit
Fresh from a triumphant commencement speech in the unfinished Greek Theatre, President Theodore Roosevelt toured Yosemite with his old pal from New York days, University President Benjamin Ide Wheeler. In Yosemite, Roosevelt slept outdoors in a snowstorm on Glacier Point and bonded with John Muir. Wheeler opined to a reporter that the view from Inspiration Point was “equal to anything around his university campus.” In 1906, during Roosevelt’s presidency, Yosemite became part of the National Park System.

1907–13 To dam or not to dam
When the controversy over the future of the Hetch Hetchy Valley ignited after the 1906 earthquake, President Benjamin Ide Wheeler was pro-dam because the system, as it was originally conceived, would provide water to the East Bay, and campus resistance to the project was somewhat squelched. In 1913 Congress approved the construction of a dam and reservoir on the Tuolumne River. O’Shaughnessy Dam was completed in 1923. To this day, spectacular photographs taken by “Little Joe” Le Conte of the pristine, turn-of-the century Hetch Hetchy Valley are known in the Sierra Club community as “Requiem for Hetch Hetchy.”

1915 Mr. Mather goes to Washington
When avid Yosemite hiker Stephen T. Mather, Class of 1887, complained to fellow Cal alum Secretary of the Interior Franklin K. Lane about the state of the parks, Lane invited him to run them himself. As assistant to the secretary, Mather immediately organized a pack train excursion of politicians, business leaders, writers, and conservationists that traipsed from the southern Sierra to Mono Lake and back through Yosemite. The trip made converts of the participants and helped bring about congressional creation of a new bureau for national parks, which Mather headed until 1928. In Yosemite, he also worked tirelessly to improve park roads and facilities for visitors. During his last trip to the park in 1925, Mather’s park friends threw a private party for him atop the Ahwahnee Hotel, which he had helped plan.

1924 Animal Life in the Yosemite
Zoologist Joseph Grinnell and UC Press published a landmark survey of mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians in Yosemite, Animal Life in the Yosemite. The survey, which started in 1904, remains a priceless snapshot of animal diversity in the Sierras, and the collection of animals gathered (housed today in the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology) includes more than 20,000 specimens, 13,000 pages of field notes, and 2,000 photographs (http://www.cr.nps.gov/history/online_books/grinnell/contents.htm#cplates).

1942 “No Yosemite for you”
During World War II, the University suggested an alternative to banishment for Japanese-American professor of art Chiura Obata, who had painted in the Sierra. Instead of dispatching him to an internment camp, why not arrange for him to live—and paint—in Yosemite? But the National Park Service, not wanting to tangle with the War Department, denied the request. At the end of the war, Obata returned to Berkeley, where President Robert Gordon Sproul had kept many of his paintings safe in the attic of University House, and Obata resumed teaching.

1962 National Park Service taps University of California
In response to public controversy over shooting elk in Yellowstone, Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall appointed professor of zoology Starker Leopold (eldest son of pioneer wildlife ecologist Aldo Leopold) chair of a committee on wildlife management. In 1963 the committee produced Wildlife Management in the National Parks, a watershed publication that determined the fate of generations of deer, elk, and bears in national parks around the country.

1989 Yosemite: The Fate of Heaven
Journalism faculty member and MacArthur fellow Jon Else captured the beauty and tortured fragility of a national park that could be loved to death in Yosemite: Fate of Heaven, a film narrated by Robert Redford and produced for the Sundance Institute.

1996–97 UC writes the book
When Congress requested a scientific review of old-growth forests and the entire Sierra Nevada ecosystem, it called on the UC Centers for Water and Wildlife Resources. The resulting massive four-volume Sierra Nevada Ecosystem Project Report is perhaps the single most comprehensive report on any mountain range.

2003 The animals are rising
Staff of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology began surveying the same areas in Yosemite that Joseph Grinnell scoured a century earlier to honor Grinnell and the museum’s centenary in 2008, discovering that many animals had all scrambled to higher ground since Grinnell’s time—doubtless decamping due to global warming.

2005 Sierra Nevada Research Institute is born
When the long-awaited tenth UC campus—UC Merced—opened, the Sierra and Yosemite became the main focus of research at the Sierra Nevada Research Institute. —Compiled by Meghan Laslocky from a text prepared by James Snyder, former historian at Yosemite National Park, and from notes of Steve Finacom, campus historian.