Greetings family, friends, and neighbors! A fledgling compay with a single aircraft provided daiy flights to Yosemite National Park beginning in 1927 for fourteen years. Today's Historical Snippet recalls the forgotten Merced and Wawona Airline....Bill
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Historic Snippets
MERCED AND WAWONA AIRLINE
The first visitors to Yosemite to witness the towering cliffs, spectacular waterfalls and immense trees traveled by horseback and on foot on paths worn into the earth for centuries by the native inhabitants. By the mid 1800’s several dusty and rutted toll trails were cleared across the foothills and blazed through the mountains by entrepreneurs anticipating a rush of sightseers, shortening the difficult journey from San Francisco to less than a week. The paths became trails, the trails wagon roads, and by the turn of the century stage coaches and buggies shared the rough and dusty roads with the first automobiles, reducing the trip to a matter of days. The completion of the Yosemite Valley Railroad in 1908 with connections to the Santa Fe Railroad in Merced reduced travel time again, and in 1926 the newly opened Merced River Canyon “All Year Highway” made travel for the vast majority of eager visitors to Yosemite National Park a pleasant and scenic day trip.
U. S. Army Lieutenant and pilot James Krull guided his canvas covered Curtis biplane to a safe touch down in Leidig Meadow in May of 1919 to the astonishment of park visitors, the first aircraft to land and take off from Yosemite Valley. Six years later a primitive three thousand foot landing strip in a Wawona pasture inside Yosemite’s southern entrance, was the site of the landing of two Army biplanes completing the flight from the military’s Crissy Field in San Francisco in just an hour and a half. Access to Yosemite National Park, once measured in weeks, and reduced to just hours, encouraged expert and experienced crop dusting and cross-country pilot, Frank Gallison along with two partners, to establish Merced and Wawona Airlines. The enterprising young men, with a single Alexander Eagle Rock ninety horsepower open cockpit biplane, began daily flights in 1927 carrying up to two passengers, mail, San Francisco newspapers and a few lightweight supplies on the fifty minute flight between the unpaved grassy runways in Merced and Wawona. The self proclaimed “airline” also offered special sightseeing trips and taxi service over Yosemite. The Wawona airstrip remained operational until 1941 when the government ruled the meadow unsuitable for air traffic. Current laws forbid commercial air tours, winged aircraft and drones below 2000 feet over Yosemite National Park. -Bill 9/25
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