Camping on the side of a rock face hundreds of feet in the air in Yosemite National Park’s Tenaya Canyon, legendary climber Ron Kauk felt a mysterious force pulling on his sleeping bag.

“It’s hard to explain,” he told SFGATE. “It was like something that came around in a teasing kind of way or something. It wasn’t anything too dramatic, no lights flashing around or flying by you, just to acknowledge that there was something else there.”

But what?

“When we were up there, something was around us,” he added. “Crazy things happen there you can’t explain.”

Kauk, celebrated internationally for his climbing exploits, knows Yosemite very well. The Redwood City native moved to the iconic park when he was just 17, living at fabled Camp 4 for decades and scaling some of Yosemite’s most challenging walls alongside a who’s who of climbing pioneers. Like those of his contemporaries, his experiences at Yosemite are shaped by the park’s storied history — one that includes dark chapters and a rumored curse for those who venture into Tenaya Canyon.

“Maybe in some kind of funny way, that’s sort of the holding place for the original spirit of the place and the people [of Yosemite],” Kauk said. “I don’t know.”

Slips, trips, falls, unusual experiences, rockslides, helicopter rescues and deaths are common occurrences in this so-called “Bermuda Triangle of Yosemite,” a challenging and trail-free part of the park running from Tenaya Lake down to Yosemite Valley. For those brave enough to traverse the 10-mile Tenaya Canyon, smooth granite slabs, risky rappelling, mandatory swims and precarious ledges await.

Many have tried, many have succeeded and many have been hurt. Even John Muir, the “Father of the National Parks,” was knocked unconscious when he fell here. It’s so accident-prone that park officials warn that “a trip into the unforgiving terrain of Tenaya Canyon … should not to be taken lightly.” There’s also an ominous park sign that greets visitors at the entrance of the treacherous canyon: “TRAVEL BEYOND THIS POINT IS DANGEROUS.”

“There are lots of places where you can slip and fall. Then you’re really in trouble,” Christopher Brennen, who climbed Tenaya Canyon in 2000, told SFGATE in a recent phone interview. Brennen, now 81, said the route includes “lots of climbing over boulders and waterfalls” with “very bare rocky slopes you have to be careful about slipping on.” In all, it took his team 10 hours to complete the journey.

“You’re always wondering what’s around the next bend,” he added. “That’s what makes it exciting.”

But like Yosemite itself, the canyon has a troubling and complicated history.

It was the site of at least one bloody conflict during the Mariposa Indian War, which took place across what is now Yosemite National Park and the surrounding Sierra Nevada from 1850 to 1851. The war followed the arrival of white European settlers years prior and decimated the Indigenous population living in the Yosemite foothills and Yosemite Valley.

In the late 1840s, that number stood at 7,000 people in the southern Sierra foothills.

It had been reduced to fewer than 700 not even a decade later.

In the middle of the conflict was Tenaya, the last known chief of the valley’s Native Ahwahneechee people and the canyon’s namesake.

“He fought to keep his people in Yosemite Valley when the Mariposa Battalion attempted their forced removal around the time of the California Gold Rush,” said Miranda Fengel, a writer and former curator at the Mariposa Museum and History Center. “He has living descendants, many of whom are members of the seven associated tribes of Yosemite, including the Southern Sierra Miwuk.”

Mentioned by description only as “chief of the Yosemites” in correspondence written in the early 1850s, Tenaya’s name first officially appeared in a now-controversial piece titled “How the Yosemite Valley was discovered and named” by Lafayette Bunnell for Hutchings’ California Magazine in May 1859. In it, Bunnell (a member of the Mariposa Battalion that forcefully removed Indigenous people from Yosemite) lays claim to a story about Tenaya in which the chief, reacting to the shooting death of his son, said, “Kill me if you like; but if you do, my voice shall be heard at night, calling upon my people to revenge me, in louder tones than you have ever made it ring.”

In a much more detailed version of the story released in 1892, Bunnell gave further credence to Tenaya’s words that day: “You may kill me, sir, Captain, but you shall not live in peace. I will follow in your foot-steps, I will not leave my home, but be with the spirits among the rocks, the water-falls, in the rivers and in the winds; wheresoever you go I will be with you. You will not see me, but you will fear the spirit of the old chief, and grow cold. The great spirits have spoken! I am done.”

Thus, the legend of a “Yosemite curse” was born.

To date, Bunnell’s stories are the only prominent retellings of what Tenaya said — a problematic story arc for many researchers and historians like author Tyler Green. While he doesn’t question that Tenaya stated some version of what he’s credited with, Green takes Bunnell’s stories with a grain of salt.

“We should at least consider that everything Bunnell tells us about Tenaya should be subject to greater scrutiny and challenge,” he said. Green’s upcoming book “Claiming Yosemite: The Civil War, the California Genocide, and the Invention of National Parks” will examine the layered history of the park in great detail.

“Historians have, for 150 years, treated those accounts that Bunnell represented as coming straight from an individual’s mouth — in this case, Tenaya’s,” Green said.

Unfortunately, the accounts leave questions unanswered.

Is the curse real? Does it only apply to Tenaya Canyon?

“The curse, specifically, I don’t know,” Green said.

For her part, Fengel agreed the chief “probably said what he was quoted as saying” in Bunnell’s differing stories but believes Tenaya’s so-called “curse” is about more than just Tenaya Canyon. “I think what he said applied to the general area of Yosemite, his home that he was defending,” she added.

Others, like Southern Sierra Miwuk Nation Vice Chairperson Waylon Coats, have learned stories of Tenaya through generations of family storytelling and understand the Yosemite curse from a very different perspective. Coats’ grandmother is among the nation’s oldest members and was one of the last Natives to be born and raised inside Yosemite at the Wahhoga Village. Tenaya is Coats’ great-great-great-grandfather.

“[The curse is] common knowledge,” he said. “We say it every time there’s a big rockslide or people die in the park. We always say a prayer and put down blessings. It’s the curse of Tenaya. Everything in Yosemite is alive. It’s the spirit of our belief. It remembers everything that those people have done to our people. When people are up there and they’re not being respectful of the rocks and the plants, bad things happen.”

Yosemite is America’s second-deadliest national park, behind only the Grand Canyon.

Coats told SFGATE that fierce battles in the valley, in Tenaya Canyon and up in Tuolumne Meadows set the stage for Tenaya’s curse and the danger that lurks in the park today.

“That’s where a lot of spirits are,” he said. “They all died in battle right there.”

The stories of Tenaya, no matter the source, serve as a reminder of how we need to treat one another and nature, Coats added.

“Me, personally, that’s where I’m from and my people are from. That’s their spirit and their ancestors right there,” he said. “Whether you’re Indigenous or non-Indigenous, you’ve got to be respectful. They are watching whether you’re carrying yourself in a humble manner. Somebody or something is always watching you.” Coats and others continue to fight for the tribe’s official recognition by the federal government, a battle that’s been going on for decades.

With that, perhaps there’s more to Kauk’s experience — and that of so many others.

“It’s kind of cool in the way it’s sort of a mystery of energy and people that were here,” he said. “If something was said, it would make you pause and think about it.”

In an email statement to SFGATE, Yosemite spokesperson Scott Gediman said, “Yosemite National Park officials acknowledge the stories and legends surrounding Tenaya Canyon. However, the park has no official position on them.”

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