Yosemite Creek Yosemite Creek Yosemite Creek is a creek of the Sierra Nevada, located in Yosemite National Park, Mariposa County, California. The creek's headwaters are at the Grant Lakes (), and it flows southwest to drop over Yosemite Falls to Yosemite Valley, then flows southeast to its mouth at the Merced River, just southwest of Yosemite Village. () The Merced is a tributary of the San Joaquin River, in the San Joaquin Valley. Today, Yosemite Creek flows over the Yosemite Valley rim to create Upper Yosemite Fall. Before its diversion about 130,000 years ago, Yosemite Creek flowed down an older channel just
Yosemite Valley built in the 1880s—still operates. After the Valley became a park, the surrounding territory was still subject to logging, mining, and grazing. John Muir publicized the damage to the subalpine meadows that surround the Valley and in 1890, the government created a national park that included a much larger territory—enclosing Yosemite Valley and Mariposa Grove. As with Yellowstone, the new federal park was under U.S. Army jurisdiction until 1914. In 1906, the state ceded the Valley and Mariposa Grove to the federal government. The National Park Service, on its creation in 1916, took over Yosemite. Yosemite Valley is listed as