Yosemite National Park hosts more than four million visitors annually, a number that underscores both the national park's immense popularity and its limits. Large numbers of visitors mean air pollution from car emissions, noise pollution that drowns out the sounds of nature, and destroyed habitat - especially near campgrounds and crowded hiking trails. From the first party of tourists in 1855 through the millions who visit today, Yosemite's visitors have played a primary role in shaping the park's history. Visitors drove Yosemite's development and, ultimately, its popularity, but in doing so, they have turned out to be the greatest threat to the very experiences they seek. In seeking to understand how visitors' perceptions and experiences have shaped their understanding of the purpose of national parks, and nature more broadly, The Mountains Are Calling places visitors at the center of Yosemite's story. In histories of the national parks, environmental historians traditionally focus on either a conflict between preservation or exploitation, or a celebration of its founders, but such approaches often overlook the millions of visitors or depict them as backdrops in a larger morality play over the preservation of nature. Michael W. Childers instead addresses the lived experiences of visitors and their role in creating national parks, within the context of national park policy shifts and broader American cultural history. Foregrounding the stories of Indigenous people, tourists, innkeepers, soldiers, rangers, climbers, concessioners, and administrators, The Mountains Are Calling tells a more complete story of the park's past to make sense of tourism's environmental costs.
Michael W. Childers is an associate professor of history at Colorado State University. He is the author of Colorado Powder Keg: Ski Resorts and the Environmental Movement, winner of the International Ski History Association 2013 Ullr Award.
Introduction Part One Chapter One: Making an American Landscape Chapter Two: Making a National Park Part Two Chapter Three: California's Playground Chapter Four: Let's Open the Parks Part Three Chapter Five: Yosemite City Chapter Six: Absolutely Democratic Epilogue: Granite, Not Gridlock
"By turning attention to the many different voices and developments that have contributed to Yosemite's history, Michael Childers offers a much richer, more diverse, and more complicated understanding of Yosemite National Park. Childers excels at uncovering interesting, important, and revealing stories that illuminate the many people and forces that have shaped the park, and in doing so, he invites readers to ponder the wonders of Yosemite and their future anew."-George Vrtis, coeditor of Mining North America: An Environmental History since 1522 "We have a lot of Yosemite scholarship, but Michael Childers is correct that we have not paid nearly enough scholarly attention to the visitors. Childers has an eye for setting a scene or a moment by opening with a narration of a person or group arriving in, walking in, or contemplating the park. The visitors in this book help us imagine the park they saw, knew, and experienced. Their stories are more captivating than those of John Muir, Theodore Roosevelt, and Carleton Watkins."-William Deverell, director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West
