OC Metro: “When most people think of staying at a historical hotel in Yosemite, they think of the Ahwahnee, the great stone and timber lodge that sits in massive harmony with nature on the floor of Yosemite Valley. Built on a grand scale and in record time in the 1920s, the Ahwahnee has been around long enough to become venerable and begin to blend into the spectacular environment that surrounds it.
But there is another, even more historic, hotel in Yosemite National Park. Twenty miles or so from the busy valley, on Highway 41 just inside the southern entrance, the Wawona Hotel sits on a gentle slope above the south fork of the Merced River. A mountain man named Galen Clark began welcoming early visitors to the area in 1856. Travelers stopped in route from Merced to Yosemite Valley for frontier lodging and refreshment in Clark’s cabin. The current main hotel building, an elegant, early Victorian structure, was built in 1879. Other buildings were added up until 1917 when the last addition was added. Early visitors to the Wawona ¬ the Indian word means ‘big tree’ ¬ included Ulysses S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, John Ruskin, Diamond Jim Brady and William Jennings Bryan.”