The Yosemite Institute, now NatureBridge, operates an environmental education campus at Crane Flat in California, under a cooperative agreement with the national park. This campus serves both the park and Yosemite Institute by fulfilling their shared mission.
The facilities comprise older buildings and structures that have been assembled over time and were not originally designed for educational purposes. To address this issue, the park and Yosemite Institute began planning for a $25 million campus facility. The facility is designed to be solar-powered and state-of-the-art, to function as a true bridge to nature.
The current facility is a collection of brown wooden buildings with ribbed metal roofs that first served as a summer camp in 1933. The dorms in the campus are insufficient to accommodate kids and offers a single wood-burning stove. Floors are slanted, paint is chipped, and the aging plumbing system has leakage. There is lack of proper class rooms and instructors live in dilapidated trailers.
If the new campus at Henness Ridge, along Highway 41 near Glacier Point Road, materializes, there will be enough beds for 224 students. About 390 kids, mostly California middle-and-high-school students, participate in the programs with their schools in the current campus.
The new facility will be equipped with its own wastewater system, fire station and classrooms. Powered by solar panels, it would feature eight cabins, four classrooms, a dining hall and an outdoor amphitheater to seat 244 people.
The prime objectives behind the project are to facilitate multi-day educational programs that complement California State Standards, to offer opportunities for research and study of the natural world and to provide a campus facility that is sustainable in design and enables high quality, immersive, and safe educational experiences for students.
Yosemite National Park is a national park spanning eastern portions of Tuolumne, Mariposa and Madera counties in east central California.
NatureBridge is the new name for Yosemite National Institutes formed in 1971 as Yosemite Institute, and has since grown to have three campuses: Headlands Institute in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, Olympic Park Institute in Olympic National Park, and Yosemite Institute in Yosemite National Park.
This nonprofit organization provides residential field science and environmental education programs for high school and elementary school students in the National Parks. They partner with parks to provide outdoor science education for schools and other groups, adult education courses, and teen wilderness adventures.
