Since its founding, the National Park Service has struggled with a dual mandate to both protect sites within its charge and provide for the enjoyment of these spaces by current and future generations. This conflict was especially consequential in Yosemite, the world’s first park set aside for preservation and public use. The park was best known for its natural wonders—thunderous waterfalls, massive granite domes, towering Sequoias—and yet over the course of the early twentieth century, tourists increasingly played in the park, instead of merely gazing at it. This marks a remarkable conceptual shift from “sacred space” to public playground. Visitors still admired the scenery, but became more physically engaged with the natural surroundings, thereby changing the very meaning of a national park vacation. Winter sports had a particularly significant impact on Yosemite’s early history. They boosted park visitation during the slow season, introduced tourists to relatively unknown forms of recreation (especially skiing), and helped redefine both the park and the state of California as year-round vacation destinations. The program was so successful that Yosemite even bid on the 1932 Winter Olympic Games, a stunning move considering the infrastructure, crowds, and congestion that generally accompanied even early Olympics. The bid failed, but the park’s snow and ice sports grew exceedingly popular by the 1930s and 1940s. Winter carnivals and other sports spectacles transformed Yosemite into a stage for human achievement, with people—often collegiate or professional athletes—as the star attractions. However, concerns over spectatorship, park atmosphere, artificiality, and more eventually doomed many of Yosemite’s most popular sports facilities and events. By exploring this often-overlooked slice of park history, this study helps reframe early debates over preservation and public use. The two were not mutually exclusive in the minds of early visitors, who believed using the land for play was an appropriate function of public landscapes.
