Highway Forty One: The Original Road to Yosemite

Highway Forty One through Oakhurst follows roughly the same route that Yosemite visitors have used since the eighteen eighties: up through the foothills, past Bass Lake, through the Sierra National Forest, and into the southern entrance of the park at Wawona. It is one of the main approaches to Yosemite, and the principal way in from the south. The road existed in some form as early as the stage lines of the railroad era, when coaches ran from the Raymond depot up into the mountains.

It was gradually improved for automobiles in the nineteen tens and twenties as motorists began making the Yosemite journey. The grades that make this section of highway so dramatic were engineered to handle the transition from foothill country at around two thousand feet to the high mountain zone above five thousand feet. One of the most celebrated moments on this route is the shift in vegetation that happens quickly and dramatically as the road climbs: the chaparral and oak woodland of the foothills gives way within a few miles to ponderosa pine and the beginning of the true mountain forest.

For the people who made this drive annually for decades, that transition is the moment Yosemite actually begins, a mile or two before the park boundary appears.