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Photographer-writer
Keith Walklet got his first glimpse of Yosemite in 1984, cruising into the national
park on a motorcycle, staying for a week and leaving with awe-filled memories.
His second visit came a few months later. It lasted 14 years.
When he left in early 1999, Walklet's possessions included some 10,000 negatives and slides, and a knowledge of the park that pass-through visitors can never achieve.
That made him a natural choice to create a new souvenir book about the park, replacing one that the Yosemite Association felt was showing its age after some 20 years in print.
"The board wanted something that had a little more substance," association director Steve Medley says. "It wanted something that would be a souvenir, but also had interpretive value and educational content, at a price that would be affordable to the general public."
That's how Yosemite: An Enduring Treasure was conceived. It reached the shelves in the park's visitor center and shops a few months ago, fulfilling all of those goals, and an-other that was unstated but obvious: the ability to catch the eye through gorgeous photographs.
The book's 54 pages contain 72-contemporary images---68 by Walklet and four by his wife, Annette Bottaro-Walklet---and a dozen from the Yosemite Research Library's rich archives. There's also a few thousand words of text, divided between short essays and informative captions.
The pictures are stunning, encompassing all the basics: icons such as Half Dome, El Capitan, Yosemite Falls and the giant redwoods; panoramas of the back country, from dramatic peaks to tranquil meadows to the thundering Tuolumne River; intimate views of grasses, flowers, wildlife and granite walls; and the changes that follow the seasons.
They comprise a collection that a visiting photographer could never gather, no matter how skillful.
"I had a tremendous advantage in being in the park from day to day," Walklet said a few days ago, from his home in Boise, Idaho. "The images are culled from superlative moments, from wandering around the park and looking at the landscape, and noting when the light was at its most
He feels they mesh tightly with the text, which touches on aspects of history, geology and seasonal change, as well as the sights that visitors can experience.
Those elements came together in a 9-by-10-inch volume that sells for an astonishing $6.95.
"How that happened is question No. 1," Walklet says. "Everyone comments about that."
He credits the achievement to Melanie Doherty Design, the San Francisco firm that assembled his words and pictures into their published form, and especially to the decision to use a format that is almost square. That choice minimizes waste of the heavy paper on which the book is printed.
It also helped that the book was printed overseas, in Singapore, he notes.
In approaching the project, Walklet culled roughly 1,000 images from the files that he and his wife had amassed, and basically left the choices to the design team.
The result, he feels, was "a tremendous job."
Although no numbers are available, park visitors and friends apparently share that feeling. Several thousand copies have been sold, at the park and over the Internet, out of a first priming that Medley estimates at 15,000.
Medley expects the book to be in circulation for many rears, but Walklet doesn't expect to get rich from his royalties.
"It will have to sell a gazillion before I have anything in the bank to show for it," he quips. "But the main thing is that it's something I'm proud of."
Yosemite: An Enduring Treasure ($6.95, Yosemite Association) is available from the Yosemite Store online, by calling (209) 379-2648, and from shops in Yosemite National Park.
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