The Lost Continent - Bill Bryson [125]
And what a disappointment that proved to be. I’m sorry to moan, I truly am, but Yosemite was a let-down of monumental proportions. It is incredibly, mouth-gawpingly beautiful. Your first view of the El Capitan valley, with its towering mountains and white waterfalls spilling hundreds of feet down to the meadows of the valley floor, makes you think that surely you have expired and gone to heaven. But then you drive on down into Yosemite village and realize that if this is heaven you are going to spend the rest of eternity with an awful lot of fat people in Bermuda shorts.
Yosemite is a mess. The National Parks Service in America – let’s be candid here – does a pretty half-assed job of running many of the national parks. This is surprising because in America most leisure-time activities are about a million times better than anywhere else. But not national parks. The visitors’ centres are usually dull, the catering is always crappy and expensive, and you generally come away having learned almost nothing about the wildlife, geology and history of the places you’ve driven hundreds of miles to see. The national parks are supposed to be there to preserve a chunk of America’s wilderness, but in many of them the number of animals has actually fallen. Yellowstone has lost all its wolves, mountain lions and white-tailed deer, and the numbers of beaver and bighorn sheep are greatly depleted. These animals are thriving outside Yellowstone, but as far as the Parks Service itself is concerned they are extinct.
I don’t know why it should be, but the National Parks Service has a long history of incompetence. In the 1960s, if you can believe it, the Parks Service invited the Walt Disney Corporation to build a development in Sequoia National Park. Mercifully, that plan was quashed. But others have succeeded, most notably in 1923 when, after a long fight between conservationists and businessmen, the Hetch Hetchey Valley in the northern part of Yosemite – which was said to be even more spectacularly beautiful than Yosemite Valley itself – was flooded to create a reservoir to provide drinking water for San Francisco, 150 miles to the west. So for the last sixty years one of the half-dozen or so most breathtaking stretches of landscape on the planet has lain under water for commercial reasons. God help us if they ever find oil there.
The great problem at Yosemite today is simply finding your way around. I’ve never seen a place so badly signposted. It’s as if they are trying to hide the park from you. At most parks the first thing you want to do is go to the visitors’ centre and have a look at the big map to get your bearings and decide what you want to see. But at Yosemite the visitors’ centre is almost impossible to find. I drove around Yosemite village for twenty-five minutes before I discovered a parking lot and then it took me a further twenty minutes, and a long walk in the wrong direction, to find the visitors’ centre. By the time I found it I knew my way around and didn’t need it any more.
And everything is just hopelessly, depressingly crowded – the cafeterias, the post office, the stores. This was in April; what it must be like in August doesn’t bear guessing at. I have never been anywhere that was simultaneously so beautiful and so awful. In the end, I had a nice long walk and a look at the waterfalls and the scenery and it was outstanding. But I cannot believe that it can’t be better run.
In the evening I drove on to Sonora, through a tranquil sunset, along sinuous mountain roads. I reached the town after dark and had difficulty finding a room. It was only the middle of the week, but most places were full. The motel I finally found was grossly overpriced and the TV reception was terrible. It was like watching people moving around in front of fun-house mirrors. Their bodies would proceed across the screen and their heads would follow a moment later, as if connected by elastic. I was paying $42 for this. The bed was like