Moving Pictures: the Yosemite Nature Notes film archive

The complete Yosemite Nature Notes series from the National Park Service, grouped by subject. Public domain, free to watch, most under ten minutes.

• Half Dome: The most recognized rock in the Sierra, and what it takes to stand on top of it.
• Rock Fall: Since the glaciers left, falling rock has done the carving here. This journal is named for what piles up below.
• Glaciers: Two small glaciers persist near the park's highest peaks. They are not what carved the Valley, but they are family.
• Sky Islands: Flat alpine plateaus near thirteen thousand feet, and the species stranded on them since the ice left.
• Granite: The cliffs and domes are one body of rock, cooled underground and exhumed. The geology behind the postcard.
• Yosemite Falls: The tallest waterfall in North America runs on snowmelt, which means it runs out.
• Tuolumne River: The park's other river, from Lyell Canyon to the reservoir that ended a valley.
• Horsetail Fall: For two weeks in February, if the water is running and the sky is clear, a thin fall on El Capitan lights up at sunset.
• Water: The Merced and the Tuolumne start as Sierra snow and end in Central Valley fields and San Francisco taps.
• Snow: The reservoir the whole state draws on arrives quietly, one storm at a time.
• Snow Line: Each storm draws a line across the Sierra where rain becomes snow. Park scientists chase it.
• Frazil Ice: On cold spring mornings, waterfall mist freezes into slush that moves down Yosemite Creek like wet concrete.
• Ski Yosemite: Before the park was a summer destination it was a winter one. Badger Pass and the Sierra's ski history.
• Winter in Tuolumne Meadows: Two rangers ski the high country all winter. What the park is like at 8,600 feet in January.
• Moonbows: On full-moon nights in spring, the mist at the base of Yosemite Falls makes rainbows by moonlight.
• Night Skies: Remote and high, the park protects some of the darkest sky left in California.
• Wildflowers: Hundreds of species bloom between the foothills and the alpine zone, on a schedule set by elevation.
• Big Trees: Deep snow and a long growing season make these forests home to some of the largest trees anywhere.
• Black Oaks: The Valley's signature hardwood, and the acorn economy that fed people here for centuries.
• Snow Plants: The red spike by the roadside in May is not a flower in any usual sense. It eats fungus.
• Fire Followers: Some seeds wait decades in the soil for a burn. The year after a fire is the year to look.
• Meadows: Three thousand meadows cover three percent of the park and hold most of its biodiversity.
• Giant Sequoias: The largest trees on earth are built to survive almost anything. Climate change is testing the design.
• Mystery Trees in Tenaya Lake: Mature trees stand rooted on the floor of one of the park's largest lakes. Explaining them rewrites the drought record.
• Birdsongs: What the park sounds like when you stop and sort the voices.
• Monarchs & Milkweed: A field of milkweed is its own small economy of bees, wasps, hummingbirds, and butterflies.
• Black Bears: Several hundred black bears live in the park. Almost everything visitors believe about them is wrong.
• Bighorn Sheep: The rarest mountain sheep in North America was down to about a hundred animals in 1995. It is climbing back.
• California Grizzly: There were ten thousand grizzlies in California in 1850. Within seventy-five years there were none.
• Mountain Yellow-Legged Frogs: Once the most common vertebrate in the high country, now endangered, and the long work of bringing them back.
• To Find a Fisher: A house-cat-sized predator so rare that finding one takes radio collars, snow tracking, and patience.
• The Yosemite Toad: First described here in the early 1900s, found only in the Sierra, and still mostly a mystery.
• Wilderness: Ninety-five percent of the park is designated wilderness. Most visitors never enter it.
• Maps: When Joseph Walker passed through in 1833 there were none. The park has been redrawn ever since.
• Rangers' Club: A 1920 building in the Valley, paid for personally by Stephen Mather, and the rangers who have lived in it since.
• Yosemite Nature Notes: The series takes its name from a typewritten news sheet started in 1922, which ran four decades and four hundred issues.
• Ghost Towns: A gold and silver rush hit Tioga Pass in 1880. What is left of it sits just above the timberline.
• Soundscapes: The park service measures quiet the way it measures air and water. A dimension most visitors never notice.
• One Day in Yosemite: On June 26, 2012, thirty filmmakers spread across the park to record a single day of the people who visit and work in it.
• Fall Moments: Autumn in the park, in passing observations. The shortest brief in the series.