Tunnel View, Yosemite

Drive north towards Yosemite on the Wawona Road and the last stretch before the valley runs through solid granite, inside the Wawona Tunnel. Then it bursts out into daylight, and the whole of Yosemite Valley is laid out ahead at once. Tunnel View, the pull-out built at the tunnel's eastern portal when it opened in 1933, frames what is probably the most reproduced landscape in America: the sheer southwest face of El Capitan on the left, the veil of Bridalveil Fall dropping from its hanging valley on the right, the Cathedral Rocks above it, and, far off at the end of the valley and dead on the axis of the view, the cleft profile of Half Dome.

The composition was recognised long before there was a road here. The first picture ever made of Yosemite Valley, a sketch by Thomas Ayres in 1855, was drawn close to where the overlook stands — Artist Point, a traditional painters' vantage, lies only a few hundred metres from the tunnel mouth. But it was Ansel Adams who fixed the view in the modern imagination. His Clearing Winter Storm, made in the late 1930s from this spot, catches the valley at the moment a December snowstorm breaks up — cloud tearing away from the cliffs, fresh snow on the trees, light pouring onto Bridalveil — and it remains one of the best-known photographs of the American West.

What makes the view endlessly worth returning to is how much it changes. In spring and early summer, when the snowmelt is at its height, Bridalveil Fall throws spray far out from the cliff; by late summer it can shrink to a thread. Early mornings often bring mist lying in the valley floor below the walls, and in the evening the low sun turns El Capitan gold while the rest of the valley falls into shadow. For a higher angle on the same scene, a trail climbs from the overlook towards Inspiration Point.

Getting there

Tunnel View is on California State Route 41 (the Wawona Road) at the eastern end of the Wawona Tunnel, just above the western end of Yosemite Valley in Yosemite National Park. The nearest sizeable town is Chowchilla, about 84 km away in a straight line; most visitors from the south come up Highway 41 from Fresno, about 94 miles (150 km) by road. The nearest airport as the crow flies is Mammoth Yosemite (MMH), about 74 km away, but it lies on the far side of the Sierra Nevada and the eastern approach over Tioga Road is seasonal, open roughly from late May or June to October.