When Yosemite National Park-bound visitors emerge from their cars at Half Dome View for a first glimpse of distant splendors, they probably pay no attention to the scattering of boulders on their right.
The chunks of granite look as if they've been there all along, a natural outcrop on the terrain along Big Oak Flat Road. But they only arrived this past summer, and each was placed with deliberate care.
"We wanted a divider to separate the viewing area from the parking, but we also wanted something organic to relate to the setting," said landscape architect Douglas Nelson of the Royston Hanamoto Alley & Abey firm. "Less of a formal design and more of a natural feel."
The boulders are just one element in the upgrade of the overlook, a project that includes a viewing area paved in concrete mixed with crushed local stone. The final touch comes next month, when park workers add plants grown from seeds and cuttings collected in the 1,169-square-mile national park.
The care shown this relatively small project is emblematic of something much larger: a design ethos for Yosemite where the overarching goal is that nothing new should make you look twice.
"The scenery is the focus," said architect Randy Fong, who is the park's chief of design. "Whatever is built or developed should enhance the (Yosemite) experience, not call attention to itself."
Fitting in has been the stated goal all along. The Ahwahnee lodge with its castle-like stone walls -- Yosemite's most imposing yet revered structure -- was billed "environmental" by the company that built it in 1927. Even the thoroughly modern Yosemite Lodge was presented to the public in 1956 as a complex that would "neither intrude upon this splendor nor seem to rival it in permanence."
These days, nothing is left to chance in a storied slice of nature that has been celebrated since the first tourist party explored it in 1855.
Instead there's "A Sense of Place: Design Guidelines for Yosemite Valley" from 2005, a hefty volume that goes so far as to spell out how log columns should be used for bus shelters in forested areas -- and how "tight knots are desirable, similar to lodgepole pine with bark peeled."
Among the consultants on "A Sense of Place" was George Homsey, a founder of EHDD, a firm distinguished by the thoughtful modernism of such efforts as the Monterey Bay Aquarium. But in a location like this, he suggests, deference is the key.
"You have to wear a different hat when you work in Yosemite. Buildings are secondary," said Homsey, who's also on a team crafting park-wide guidelines to be released next year. "It's all about the use of materials, the image you conjure up."
To some extent, the guidelines merely spell out a direction that has evolved by trial and error. There's no better example than a project that opened the year the guidelines were released but was conceived a decade earlier: the approach to Yosemite Falls.
The 2,425-foot cascade celebrated by John Muir as "the wildest displays of her (nature's) power" attracts crowds that can exceed 10,000 people a day. But the experience was strictly stop-and-gawk, the falls reached by a straight asphalt path from a parking lot that could hold 50 tour buses at a time.
No longer. The 56 acres at the base were recast in an ambitious, naturalistic design by Lawrence Halprin, the landscape architecture legend who died on Oct. 25 and in 2005 spoke of how Yosemite "has affected me spiritually as well as physically."
The straight trail now is a mile-long loop, graded for almost full wheelchair access most of the way. A small amphitheater is formed from clustered boulders.
The parking lot is gone, replaced by native vegetation and picnic tables. The restroom building resembles a ski chalet; the bus shelter has a rustic tone.
This lavish attention to detail wouldn't occur without private donations that tap into the park's long hold on the American imagination.
The transformation of the base of the falls had a $14.5 million budget; $13 million was provided by the Yosemite Fund, a nonprofit organization that has contributed $55 million to park programs and projects since it was founded in 1988.
Similarly, the fund picked up the tab for the $800,000 redo of Half Dome Overlook. It also helped restore the luster of three other famed vantage points: Glacier Point, Olmsted Point and Tunnel View Overlook. All were designed by RHAA.
"Everything the park service does, there's someone looking over their shoulder," Homsey said. "Yosemite is the mother church."
E-mail John King at jking(at)sfchronicle.com. For more stories visit scrippsnews.com
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