We’re taking a trip today to a gem of California: Yosemite National Park. Known for its majestic waterfalls and towering granite walls, the park attracts about 4 million tourists each year. And change has come to the park, altering the idyllic Sierra Nevada landscape that naturalist John Muir famously wrote about and protected.

We’ll look at some of those changes in this excerpt from the first episode of the podcast, YosemiteLand, which launched in Summer 2018. CapRadio’s Environment Reporter, Ezra David Romero spent months gathering and reporting stories from Yosemite.

In this episode, he examines the impact of tourists and commercialization on the Yosemite Valley. This part of the story also covers how social media has changed the ways visitors interact with the park and introduces listeners to an effort to bring more diversity to the park through the nonprofit, NatureBridge. The journey starts at one of the most popular tourist spots, Yosemite Falls.