My Mule Deer Memoir: Learning to Share Space ~ Part 1

“National parks offer a unique experience for watching wildlife.

Animals in parks are wild—visitors have the amazing

opportunity to view animals as they live and interact

with each other in their natural homes.

“But with that privilege comes responsibility. Visitors are responsible

for their own safety and for the safety of the animals, too.

Simply put, leave animals alone—no touching, no feeding, no harassing. 

“Just remember to keep your distance

and enjoy your experience watching wildlife.”

National Park Service Website

Retrieved March 25, 2026

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Mule Deer on Alert in Yosemite Valley

My fascination with Yosemite’s mule deer began in 1967, when I was nine years old and visiting Yosemite National Park for the first time. We were staying in Wawona, and although I didn’t yet have the language for it, something about those animals—calm, watchful, utterly uninterested in the rules of my suburban world—took hold of me and never quite let go.

That was nearly sixty years ago.

I mention this not to ask for sympathy (though I won’t refuse it), but to establish context. The Yosemite of the late 1960s was not the Yosemite of today. The line between humans and wildlife—clear and firmly enforced now—was, at the time, more of a suggestion.

Visitors were warned not to feed animals, yes, but those warnings coexisted with practices that, in hindsight, seem almost comically contradictory. Bears, for instance, were discouraged from begging at picnic tables while being actively accommodated at open garbage dumps, where evening “showings” drew crowds of spectators.

Even into the 1970s, during later visits to Wawona, my family and I would lie awake at night listening to black bears clang trash can lids against the ground with what sounded like both determination and culinary optimism. At times, we would rush from our beds and observe their focused food searches from a nearby window or high above on an elevated deck.  More often than not, they were rewarded for their efforts (as a family of 13, we produced plenty of food scraps). Secure food storage, strict enforcement, and the now-familiar culture of wildlife awareness were still evolving concepts, not yet the deeply ingrained norms they would become.

Formal penalties for feeding wildlife did not arrive until around 1970. Bear-proof lockers, now ubiquitous, were only introduced gradually over the following decades. In short, the world I stepped into as a child allowed—if not encouraged—a kind of proximity to wildlife that would rightly raise alarms today.

And yet, the instinct that drove that proximity has not disappeared. Humans remain drawn to animals, whether in national parks, zoos, or their own homes. We study them, name them, photograph them, and—despite every posted warning sign—occasionally make the ill-advised decision to get just a little closer than we should.

Yosemite Valley, in particular, can blur the boundaries. There is, at times, an almost theatrical quality to it—a landscape so visually perfect, and wildlife so seemingly at ease among humans, that it invites a kind of misplaced familiarity. Deer wander through campgrounds and meadows with an air of quiet entitlement, as if they are not visiting us, but tolerating us.

As a child, I was captivated.

Even during that first trip, when deer sightings were relatively few, the possibility of encountering them was enough to keep me alert, scanning the edges of meadows and the shadows between trees. When I did see them, the experience felt almost unreal—something far removed from the animated reindeer of holiday television and much closer to stepping into another world entirely.

What struck me most was not just their presence, but their awareness. The mule deer seemed to possess an unspoken understanding of space—an invisible boundary that, when respected, allowed for a kind of quiet coexistence. From a distance, if I remained still and patient, they would go about their lives as though I were simply another feature of the landscape. In those moments, they revealed glimpses of behavior—subtle, curious, sometimes even playful—that felt less like observation and more like a kind of permission.

It was a lesson I didn’t fully understand at the time, and one I occasionally tested with the questionable judgment typical of a pre-teenager.

So before the words “idiot,” “dumb,” or “what were you thinking?” begin forming in the reader’s mind, I’ll offer this: you’re not wrong. But you are reading a story from a different time—one in which both people and policies were still learning, often the hard way, how to share space with the wild.

What follows is not a defense of those actions, but a recollection of them—an attempt to understand how a boy’s curiosity, a park’s evolving rules, and a population of remarkably tolerant mule deer came together to shape a fascination that has lasted a lifetime.

I’ll explain how it all unfolded in Part 2.