Yosemite Museum
Here we have a lady in the late 1930s partaking in a great American past time: visiting a national park. Imer Lorene Guthrie is standing outside the Yosemite Museum in the Yosemite National Park in southern California.
Yosemite National Park was first created in 1864. It protected about 1,200 square miles of land. In the park one can find giant sequoia trees, beautiful meadows, and rugged valleys. It is a beautiful piece of wilderness.
The National Parks website states: It is a land of contrasts, with its thundering waterfalls, soaring granite cliffs, serene meadows, and the largest trees on earth. Yosemite is also a wellspring of human aspiration. It is the birthplace of the national park movement, a muse for writers, painters, and photographers, and a natural resource that has fueled the growth of California and the Western United States.
The Yosemite Museum was finished in 1925. The building was built in a rustic style meant to blend into the natural surroundings. Museum architect Herbert Maier described the relationship between the Museum and its natural surroundings by saying, “The elevation of the museum stresses the horizontal—that seemed the logic of the situation…to attempt altitudinal impressiveness here in a building would have meant entering into a competition with the cliffs.”
Today, visiting national parks is still a great American past time. In 2016 Yosemite had over 5 million visitors. What National Park will you visit this year?
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Thank you for reading.
Jenny Findsen