Yosemite: Olmsted Point (Jr.)

(Continued from Yosemite: Olmsted Point (Sr.))

Featured Photo: “Half Dome and Evergreens, Olmsted Point”  Yosemite National Park, California—2023

Let me begin by addressing the questions I posed in the last post about Olmsted Point: whether it was named for Frederick Law Olmsted and how Olmsted might be connected with Yosemite. (And I apologize in advance for the paucity of pictures in this preliminary portion of today’s post.)

I learned from the National Park Service Website that Olmsted Point was indeed named after the famed landscape architect, Frederick Law Olmsted and his son, Frederick Jr., who was also a landscape architect. As for the link between Olmsted Sr. and Yosemite, I found the answer in a book I began reading after our Yosemite trip: a biography titled A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir, written by Donald Worster.

While telling Muir’s remarkable story—his early life, his inventions, his work, research, writing, and travels, with his passion for the natural world and his ability to get others to see its beauty—Worster also writes of other important figures whose lives intersected Muir’s, including President Theodore Roosevelt, the philosopher and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the elder Olmsted, with his connection to Yosemite.

Drawing from Worster’s book, after President Abraham Lincoln had signed the bill in 1864 giving Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoias to the state of California to preserve for public use and recreation, a Yosemite Commission of eight men was appointed by the governor to act as stewards. Galen Clark (who I mentioned in an earlier post) was one of the members appointed to this Commission, serving as Yosemite’s first park guardian.

Olmsted was another member of the Commission—acting as its “First Commissioner”—and in 1865, he wrote a key document, titled “Yosemite and the Mariposa Grove: A Preliminary Report”, which expressed the aspirational vision of creating public parks as keystone institutions of the American democracy. In his report, Olmsted argued that the main principle for Yosemite should be the preservation and maintenance of the park’s natural scenery. For Olmsted, according to Worster, “the most immediate threats came from those who would throw up inharmonious accommodations for tourists, but he also singled out the painting on walls and rocks of advertisements for patent medicines and the hacking and burning down of trees.”

In 1889, more than 20 years after John Muir’s first visit to Yosemite—and more than 20 years after Olmsted’s report—Muir once again toured his beloved Yosemite Valley, this time with Robert Underwood Johnson, the associate editor of the influential New York magazine, The Century. Both Muir and Johnson were disturbed by what they saw in the tourist-dominated valley, which was awash in tacky commercialization. As Worster writes, “the state-appointed Yosemite Commission had allowed the extraordinary place to deteriorate into an overgrazed, overcut, overbuilt shamble.”

Sitting together at a campfire in the high country, where the tourists seldom ventured, Muir and Johnson talked about protecting Yosemite as a National Park—as done earlier at Yellowstone—with federal rather than state control. Muir would later write an article for The Century that included a map suggesting the outlines of the proposed National Park.

As for the immediate task of rescuing the valley, the men agreed that Frederick Law Olmsted should be brought back and put in charge of cleaning up the mess. “Olmsted alone,” writes Worster, “had the skilled eye to eliminate the ugly and restore the beautiful.” The state commissioners, however, were adamantly against bringing Olmsted in, unwilling to admit their failure, while Olmsted himself—then in his mid to late-60’s—seemed uninterested in taking command. This left Muir and Johnson to continue leading the fight to save Yosemite and establish it as a National Park, which was achieved in 1890, in a bill signed into law by President Benjamin Harrison.

So that was the connection between Olmsted Sr. and Yosemite. However, I knew nothing at all about Olmsted’s son and namesake, Frederick Jr.—the other Olmsted for whom Yosemite’s Olmsted Point was named.

In fact, it seems the younger Olmsted had an even broader impact on the National Park system in America. Pulling together information from two seemingly reliable sources (the National Park Service Website and the Olmsted Network), I learned that from his earliest years, young Olmsted was aware of his father’s fervent desire to have him carry on both the family name and profession. To ensure his son had productive experiences that would serve him well as a landscape architect, the elder Olmsted included Frederick Jr. in the culminating projects of his own career. While still in college, young Olmsted spent a summer working in Chicago while the “White City” was being developed for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. After his graduation, his father brought Frederick Jr. to the Biltmore Estate, where he assisted in the landscape design and construction underway there.

When his father grew ill and eventually retired from the family business, Frederick Jr. became more active in the firm, assuming the role of partner. Following his father’s design philosophy, he had an abiding concern that cities be planned to provide for healthy living and working conditions and scenic recreational opportunities. With his half-brother, John Charles Olmsted, he helped establish the American Society of Landscape Architects, serving as its president for two terms. He was appointed instructor in landscape architecture at Harvard, where he helped create the country’s first degree program in the profession.

Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. was a passionate advocate for the preservation of natural areas throughout the country. He would say it was his father who instilled in him the idea that it was his mission “to protect and perpetuate whatever of beauty and inspirational value is inherent in that landscape.” Fifty years after the elder Olmsted’s Preliminary Report on Yosemite, Frederick Jr. was called upon to amplify and refine his father’s Yosemite legacy, addressing the need for a new bureau to professionally manage more than three dozen national parks and monuments scattered across the West.

“The present situation in regard to the national parks is very bad,” Olmsted Jr. wrote. “They have been created one at a time by acts of Congress which have not defined at all clearly the purposes for which the lands were to be set apart, nor provided any orderly or efficient means of safeguarding the parks.” Olmsted Jr. crafted his famous definition of purposes for the 1916 Organic Act—the legislation that established a unified system of national parks:

“To conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wildlife therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.”

Drawing a conclusion from another page of the Olmsted Network, any exploration into the founding philosophy of America’s National Parks inevitably leads to the Olmsteds. The prescient vision of Frederick Law Olmsted Sr. for Yosemite (and all public lands) in 1865 and the timely contribution by Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. of a statement of purposes for the National Park Service’s 1916 Organic Act have had profound and lasting consequences for the nation and the world. Their legacy of conservation lives on in a system of nearly 400 national park areas, reflecting the high purpose and refinement of a democratic nation and its citizenry.

And now, having been duly informed, we can all appreciate that it is more than fitting for Yosemite’s Olmsted Point to be so named. I should probably end this post with these inspirational lessons, but before I let you go, I want to share the additional pictures I took while my sister and I were at Olmsted Point. I captured images of Half Dome outlined by erratic boulders and evergreen trees, which seemed to thrive despite growing in almost no visible soil.

For other photos, I zoomed in, so the border around Half Dome consisted of only the trees…

…and in other photos, I also captured the smooth granite landscape (today’s Featured Photo). As I continued walking along, I noticed an isolated pine tree that added a new element to my Half Dome portraits…

…then moved closer to focus in on the solitary tree…

…before looking down, astounded to see the roots of this determined pine embedded in the fractures of the granite surface.

Farther along, I realized I could climb to an even higher point on the rocky surface, where I captured this photo…

…and as I began my descent back down toward the parking area, my sister captured this photo of me.

We planned to return to Olmsted Point on our return journey later that day, to capture the view in the afternoon light—a plan that would be spoiled by the hazy smoke that was still rising from the controlled fire in Yosemite Valley. Ready to move on, we left Olmsted Point and drove the short distance to our next stop: beautiful Tenaya Lake, with its crystal-clear water.

(To be continued…)