Yosemite National Park

Long before Congress invented the idea of a national park, California was already trying to save Yosemite Valley from the hotels and sawmills creeping toward it. In 1864, in the middle of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln signed a bill granting the valley and the nearby Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias to the state of California to protect "for public use, resort, and recreation" — the first time the federal government had set aside land specifically for its scenery rather than its resources. California managed the grant, awkwardly and often poorly, for 26 years before Congress folded the surrounding high country into a true national park in 1890, with the valley itself following in 1906.

The valley was not empty land when Americans arrived: the Ahwahneechee people had lived there for centuries, and in 1851 a state militia called the Mariposa Battalion marched in specifically to drive them out and burn their villages, clearing ground that would later be celebrated as untouched wilderness. Decades later, naturalist John Muir made Yosemite the center of his campaign for wilderness preservation, cofounding the Sierra Club in 1892 largely to defend it. Muir lost his most painful fight in 1913, when Congress approved damming Hetch Hetchy, a second Yosemite-like valley inside the park, to supply water to San Francisco — a decision conservationists still cite as a founding wound of the environmental movement.

Yosemite's granite walls have since become the proving ground for an entire sport: El Capitan's sheer 3,000-foot face and Half Dome's rounded summit turned the valley into the birthplace of modern rock climbing, culminating in Alex Honnold's free solo ascent of El Capitan without ropes in 2017. More than four million people visit the park each year, most of them still funneled into the seven-square-mile valley Lincoln set aside in 1864, now ringed by the wilderness that took more than a century of additional fighting to protect alongside it.