Taft Point
— — the fissures the granite keeps open.
Not only on a wall.
“A granite shelf on the south rim of Yosemite Valley, about 3,500 feet straight down to the floor and directly across from El Capitan. The Fissures cut the rim in long narrow slots wide enough to drop a pebble into and watch it disappear. There is no railing. The walk in from Glacier Point Road is a little over a mile through Jeffrey pine and red fir, and most afternoons the last hour before sunset belongs to the wind.
Taft Point, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Taft Point sits at 7,503 feet on the south rim of Yosemite Valley, within Yosemite National Park in Mariposa County, California. The point looks directly across at El Capitan, about three miles north, and down roughly 3,500 vertical feet to the valley floor along the Merced River. The trailhead is on Glacier Point Road, 13 miles east of Chinquapin junction. The Fissures, a set of deep vertical cracks slicing through the granite rim, are the point's signature feature. The name honours William Howard Taft, who visited the park as Secretary of War in 1909.
The Fissures are vertical joints in the Sentinel Granodiorite, a coarse-grained Cretaceous pluton roughly 95 million years old, which was exposed and shaped by Pleistocene glaciers. Five major fissures cut the rim, the deepest dropping more than 30 metres straight down to the cliff face below. The slots formed along pre-existing fractures that the ice and frost wedging widened over time. The rim has no railing or guardwire; the National Park Service has logged multiple fatal falls here, most recently in 2018 and 2021.
The trail is 2.2 miles round trip from the Taft Point/Sentinel Dome trailhead on Glacier Point Road, with about 250 feet of elevation gain, rated easy to moderate. Glacier Point Road typically opens late May or early June and closes with the first heavy snow, usually by November. Sunset is the standard arrival time and the parking lot fills well before. The 2022 Washburn Fire burned parts of the surrounding forest; sections of standing dead Jeffrey pine line the last half mile.