Dan's Outside

"The Grand Register of Yo-Semite Valley"

From an article in SFGate:

Yosemite National Park received a treasure out of its own past Friday when philanthropist Bill Lane presented the park with the original “Grand Register of Yo-Semite Valley” at a small ceremony at Stanford University.

The Grand Register was a fixture at the Cosmopolitan, a bath house and saloon in the early days of tourism at Yosemite. Distinguished visitors were asked to sign the guest book and offer any comments…

…The signing began in 1873 and continued until 1884, and the book contains more than 18,000 signatures, including those of four U.S. presidents: Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield and Theodore Roosevelt.

Roosevelt got special treatment. He visited the park in 1903, long after the register was closed. Roosevelt didn’t visit the Cosmopolitan; he made a point of not entering a building, except to drink a lemonade at a studio in the valley. Instead, he went camping with John Muir.

See the article for more information and some photographs.

December 15, 2007 - Posted by gdanmitchell | Events