National Park Week: The Yosemite Story

Celebrating the National Park Service’s 110th birthday and the place that helped inspire America’s promise to preserve wonder for everyone.

During National Park Week, from August 22–30, 2026, the country pauses to celebrate the landscapes, stories, and landmarks protected by the National Park Service. The week’s centerpiece was yesterday, August 25, the 110th birthday of the National Park Service, created in 1916 to preserve America’s natural and cultural treasures for the enjoyment, education, and inspiration of present and future generations.

Long before there were more than 400 national park sites across the United States, there was Yosemite: a valley of granite walls, falling water, ancient sequoias, and quiet meadows that stirred the imagination of a young nation. In the 1850s and 1860s, artists, photographers, writers, and early advocates carried Yosemite’s image beyond the Sierra Nevada, helping Americans see it not as land to be claimed or consumed, but as a place too rare to lose.

That vision became law on June 30, 1864, when President Abraham Lincoln signed the Yosemite Grant. The act set aside Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias for “public use, resort, and recreation,” placing them under California’s care and declaring them inalienable for all time. At a moment when the nation was still torn by the Civil War, the Yosemite Grant was an act of faith in the future: a belief that some places should be protected not for profit, but for people.

Galen Clark, one of Yosemite’s early champions, became the first guardian of the Yosemite Grant and devoted decades to protecting the valley and the Mariposa Grove. His work, along with the voices of many others, helped plant the seed for a national park movement that would grow into Yosemite National Park in 1890 and, eventually, the National Park Service in 1916.

So this National Park Week, Yosemite’s story reminds us why parks matter. They are classrooms without walls, sanctuaries for wildlife, keepers of memory, and invitations to wonder. Celebrating 110 years of the National Park Service is also a call to carry the promise forward—so future generations can stand beneath giant sequoias, hear the thunder of waterfalls, and feel the same awe that helped inspire a nation to protect its most extraordinary places.