Soda Springs and Parsons Lodge

Walk along the gravel road and pass the locked gate (signed Glen Aulin and Soda Springs).  Soda Springs—carbonated, cold water bubbling out of the ground—is protected within a log enclosure.  A path winds to the bridge below and continues on to the Tuolumne Meadows Visitor Center.

The Parsons lodge is a memorial to Edward Taylor Parsons, a New Yorker who joined the Sierra Club about 1900, and eventually became the club’s director from 1905 to 1914. Parsons was heavily involved in the losing fight against the flooding of the Hetch Hetchy Valley to provide a municipal water source for San Francisco. Parsons died in 1914, and in memorial, the Sierra Club established a fund to build a club meeting house, library, and headquarters in Yosemite. The site at Tuolumne Meadows was chosen for its accessibility to park backcountry and its location near Soda Springs, a location that the Sierra Club wished to safeguard.

The Soda Springs Cabin is a historic structure in Yosemite National Park in the USA. It was built about 1889 by John Baptist Lembert, the first European settler in the Tuolumne Meadows area of Yosemite. Lembert had filed a claim to 160 acres (65 ha) in Tuolumne Meadows in 1885 after spending three summers in the area with a flock of angora goats. Lembert built a log cabin directly over the largest soda spring in the area. Although the property was within the park boundaries, Lembert received a patent to the property in 1895. Lembert’s cabin was along the Great Sierra Wagon Road over the Sierra Nevada. He became a guide for tourists in the high country, gaining a reputation as a naturalist and entomologist. He spent the winter months in a place near Cascade Creek in the Yosemite Valley.