Photos

Many people already know about Yosemite Valley, which is the heart of Yosemite National Park. But here are the basics. The location is on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada mountains in eastern California, about 240 km from San Francisco. The valley floor is about 1200 m above sea level and extends about 11 km in a mainly east-west direction. On the north and south sides are spectacular granite cliffs that rise about 1000 m above the valley floor. The most famous of these are Half Dome and El Capitan. The valley was created by glacial action during the recent ice ages (10,000 y ago and earlier). The rocks themselves are as much as 100 million years old.

This photo is of a fairly common scene in the valley floor, but doesn't receive so much attention because it is overshadowed by the more spectacular cliffs. We are looking west from about the middle of the valley. So far as I know, the rock displayed in the right half of the frame is the smallest of the Cathedral Rocks; it rises a few hundred m. In the left half of the frame, one can see the base of the main Cathedral Rocks, which rise roughly 1 km above the valley floor.