A public archive
Yosemite Nature Notes, 1922 onward
For more than sixty years the naturalists of Yosemite National Park wrote down what they saw. Bears at the pits, the first Steller's jay of the season, a glacier measured, a meadow burned, the firefall lit and the firefall stopped. They mailed it out as a bulletin called Yosemite Nature Notes. This is that run, 512 issues of it, transcribed from the original scans and free to read.
- Issues
- 512
- Years
- 1922–2003
- Words
- 1,872,000
Browse by decade
1920s 115 issues
1930s 119 issues
1940s 113 issues
1950s 113 issues
1960s 15 issues
1970s 25 issues
1980s 11 issues
2000s 1 issues
About this archive
Yosemite Nature Notes began on July 10, 1922 as a mimeographed sheet from the park naturalist's office, and ran, monthly for most of its life, into the 1980s. It was published by the National Park Service together with the Yosemite Natural History Association, the organisation that became today's Yosemite Conservancy. The writing is first-hand and often very plain: a ranger noting what was on the trail that week.
The scans these transcriptions were made from are hosted by yosemite.ca.us, and every issue page links back to the exact PDF it came from. Text was extracted from the originals rather than retyped, then re-flowed into paragraphs; headlines are reproduced in the capitals the bulletin printed them in. Spelling and punctuation are left as published, including terms and attitudes of their period that the Park Service would not use today.
Dates come off each issue's own masthead. Where a cover carried no legible date, the year is taken from the rest of that volume and the page says so rather than presenting a guess as a fact. Works of United States Government authorship are in the public domain; later issues were published by the Natural History Association, and any rights holder who wants an issue removed or corrected should get in touch and it will be.
Found an error in a transcription? Tell us which issue and it gets fixed.
Also worth your time
The Park Service revived the name for a series of short films, also called Yosemite Nature Notes, and they are very good. They are collected on the films page. For what is happening in the park this week rather than in 1934, there is The Park Bulletin.