Yosemite National Park Gets A Google Logo To Mark Its 123rd Birthday

Today’s Google logo celebrates the Yosemite National Park, which congress established as a national park on this date in 1890.

The logo includes a collection of badges with “Google” front and center on a yellow badge featuring the park’s famous Half Dome Mountain. A John Muir Trail (JMT) badge is included along with others to highlight park activities like rock climbing and camping.

With the Lincoln land grant in 1864 to preserve the area, the Yosemite Grant was the first time the US federal government designated an area of land to be preserved for public use. As a result of the combined efforts of  Sierra Club founder John Muir and Century Magazine editor Robert Underwood Johnson, Yosemite became a national park in 1890 when the two lobbied congress to further protect the nearly 1,200 miles that spread across the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada mountain chain in California’s Tuolumme, Mariposa and Madera counties.

Home to spectacular granite cliffs, waterfalls, clear streams, and giant sequoia groves, the park sees approximately four million visitors a year. Unfortunately, no one can visit the park today as it, along with many other national parks, are closed because of the government shut-down.