Yosemite National Park

Yosemite offers an incredible diversity of lodging possibilities, from the palatial Ahwahnee Hotel to the barebones "Housekeeping Camp." Where you wind up depends as much on your budget as on your timing.

Although the lure of the Yosemite Valley with its waterfalls and granite walls is foremost in many park visitors' minds, the national park is a Mecca for hiking, with plentiful choices for day hikers as well as long-distance warriors.

Stick your head into Yosemite Valley in Yosemite and you'll quickly come to appreciate why they say that 95 percent of the park's visitors can be found in the spectacularly scenic valley. And while it's good they've come to explore the valley, they'll head home greatly shortchanged if they don't explore the rest of the park.

Despite the towering walls of granite that rim the Yosemite Valley, the place is decidedly not static. Rather, it's a constantly evolving geologic entity that is both deadly and mesmerizing. In this production of Yosemite Nature Notes, videographer Steven M. Bumgardner explains how, since the disappearance of glaciers about 15,000 years ago, rock falls have become the greatest erosional factor in the continued sculpting of Yosemite Valley.

When the afternoon sun illuminates Horsetail Fall in Yosemite, it can be difficult to believe it's only the sun igniting the waterfall. In the following episode of Yosemite Nature Notes, videographer Steven Bumgardner explains some of the natural history behind this phenomenon and offers some tips on how to capture a photograph of it yourself

In this edition of Yosemite Nature Notes, Steven Bumgardner and his crew head into the high country of the park to learn about glaciers, such as the Lyell Glacier.

Most visitors to Yosemite National Park tour the Yosemite Valley and head out of the park. A small percentage of others take to the Tioga Road and destinations off of it. One area that the vast majority of visitors misses is along the roof of the park, where you'll find "sky islands." Fortunately, you can gain insights to these landscapes -- "high, flat plateaus ... found at elevations around 12,000 and 13,000 thousand feet" -- thanks to videographer Steven Bumgardner and his team at Yosemite.

Yosemite National Park harbors more than just towering walls of rock and wispy waterfalls. There also are big, big trees -- giant sequoias -- that you can find in the Mariposa Grove, or the Tuolumne Grove, or Merced Grove. Yosemite videographer Steven Bumgardner shows off those trees in the following episode of Yosemite Nature Notes.

Many of us associate trees with our national park visits. Aspens and lodgepoles in Rocky Mountain, Grand Teton, and Yellowstone national parks, for instance, hemlocks in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, or cypress in Everglades National Park. In Yosemite National Park, the black oak is one of the iconic trees, one that strikes Steven Baumgardner, the park's videographer, in particular.

The name can be a mouthful, turning your tongue in knots as you try to pronounce "Two-ahl'-oh-me." Native American in origin, some believe Tuolumne means "Many Stone Houses" or "Straight Up Steep," which, if you've ever traveled the Tioga Road through Yosemite certainly seems appropriate. In this episode of Yosemite Nature Notes the constantly filming and editing Steven Bumgardner takes a look at this river from "its glacial headwaters at 13,000 feet down through Tuolumne Meadows and into the Grand Canyon of the Tuolumne"