Yosemite National Park pendant
This one of a kind necklace highlights the crags in the great granite faces of Half Dome and El Capitan as well as the waterfalls that remind one how this valley was formed.
If I was forced to pick my favorite National Park it would be Yosemite. Even with its grandeur I find it intimate. You enter the valley and are surrounded by granite faces and peaceful meadows. One can easily imagine the Miwok people, the Ahwahneechee, raising their families within these granite walls. It's the one I've gone to the most both as a late teen in a tent with a group of friends to my 20's and 30's at Yosemite Lodge and finally the Ahwahnee which does better than any other hotel I know in blending in with the landscape and yet highlighting the majesty of Yosemite. If you go treat yourself to a meal in the dining room of the Ahwahnee. You'll thank me. You'll also thank me if you go off season. You can catch beautiful weather for hiking in the fall with much fewer people. I'm a proponent of limiting the number of people given access to our parks on any given day not only so one can experience nature, but to protect it as well.
So many memories tied to this special park. As a late teen I jumped off a bridge into the Merced River to show the boys I was as brave as they were. I ended up saving a child that was swimming and losing ground to the current as I was gasping in the cold water. And some memories best left in my head. I was never a rock climber so I never climbed Half Dome. In fact I got as far as the chains and my legs went all wobbly. In the more recent couple of decades we've enjoyed going to the Vintner Holidays held at the Ahwahnee. Friends of ours had never missed a single one and we were fortunate enough to go with them for a few years.
“If future generations are to remember us with gratitude rather than contempt, we must leave them something more than the miracles of technology. We must leave them a glimpse of the world as it was in the beginning, not just after we got through it.”
President Lyndon B. Johnson; 36th president of the United States