1999 VHS • Yosemite America's Most Beautiful Valley 60 FPS

About

Yosemite: America's Most Beautiful Valley is a narrated documentary covering the natural history, geological origins, human history, and conservation legacy of Yosemite National Park in the Sierra Nevada mountains of central California. The program opens with quotations from naturalist John Muir before tracing the park's origins through Chief Tenaya's Miwok creation story, Muir's glacial theory, and the history of Native American habitation stretching back approximately 10,000 years through the Miwok settlement of the valley they called Ahwahnee. The Mariposa Battalion's entry in 1851 as the first recorded white men in the valley leads into the early tourist era, journalist James Hutchings's 1855 expedition, and Horace Greeley's visit in 1859.

The documentary covers the Yosemite Land Grant signed by President Abraham Lincoln on June 30, 1864, Muir's campaign for national park status achieved on October 1, 1890, President Theodore Roosevelt's three-day camping trip with Muir in 1903, and the National Park Service's creation in 1916 under first superintendent Stephen Mather. Natural features covered include Half Dome, El Capitan, Yosemite Valley, the Merced River, Nevada Falls, Vernal Falls, Bridalveil Falls, and Yosemite Falls, the tallest waterfall in North America at 2,600 feet. The program also covers the Hetch Hetchy Dam controversy and President Woodrow Wilson's 1913 signing of the reservoir bill, winter conditions in the valley, wildlife including mule deer and coyotes, the giant sequoias of the Mariposa, Tuolumne, and Merced groves, and the history and eventual toppling of the Wawona tree. The program closes with a conservation message drawn from Muir's writings.

Human-made No record of this work says a model made it. What this means.

Archive

Internet Archive, in The VHS Vault

Licence or status

The Internet Archive states none for this item.

Credit

The Vista Group®

Language

English

Subtitles

English (automatic)

Who can watch

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