Yosemite Valley

The camera stands on the grass at the very edge of the Merced, low enough that the water starts a couple of feet away and runs off across most of one side of the view. El Capitan is directly across it - a single unbroken face of pale granite going up out of the trees, with the whole thing repeated upside down in the river because the water here is barely moving. That reflection is the reason people stop at this particular spot. Turn away from it and the valley closes in immediately: tall conifers standing straight up all round, a strip of meadow, deadfall in the grass, and the ground going soft and dark under the trees. There is a second set of rock towers showing through the trees further round. The scale does not read properly - the cliff looks like a large rock face rather than three thousand feet of one, because there is nothing on it to measure by.

Yosemite Valley holds the images that made the park famous. Half Dome closes the eastern end, El Capitan stands over the western entrance, and the Merced River runs the length of the floor between them, flat enough on a still morning to carry the whole reflection.

The valley is about seven miles long and roughly a mile wide, cut by a glacier that squared off what had been a V-shaped river canyon. The walls it left are what draw climbers: El Capitan alone is around three thousand feet of continuous granite, and a route up it was considered impossible until 1958.

It is a small fraction of the park - Yosemite covers 1,189 square miles and 89 percent of that is designated wilderness - but it is where most of the four million annual visitors spend their time, and where the trails, the climbing routes and the lodging are.