The National Park Service, or NPS, is a federal agency within the U.S. Department of the Interior. The U.S. Congress made Yellowstone America’s first national park in 1872. In the years that followed, environmentalists including John Muir lobbied for wilderness preservation ...read more
1. Yosemite was not America’s first national park. When President Abraham Lincoln signed legislation in 1864 that designated the 7-mile-long Yosemite Valley and Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias a public trust of the state of California, it marked the first time that the U.S. ...read more
Joseph Reddeford Walker, one of the greatest trailblazing mountain men and the first Anglo-American to see Yosemite, is born in Tennessee. Although he had little formal education, Walker was an exceptionally intelligent explorer and leader, possessing an extraordinary ability to ...read more
On this day in 1999, the bodies of Carole Sund and Silvina Pelosso are found in a charred rental car in a remote wooded area of Long Barn, Califonia. The women, along with Sund’s daughter Juli, had been missing since February when they were last seen alive at the Cedar Lodge near ...read more
On this day in 1999, law enforcement officials discover the charred bodies of forty-two-year-old Carol Sund and sixteen-year-old Silvina Pelosso in the trunk of their burned-out rental car, a day after the vehicle was located in a remote area several hours from Yosemite National ...read more