Biohazard and Pathogen Disinfection in Fish Camp, CA

Fish Camp is an unincorporated census-designated place in Mariposa County, California, a small tourist community on State Route 41 just south of the southern entrance to Yosemite National Park.

Fish Camp sits at about 5,060 feet elevation in the Sierra Nevada, roughly 12 miles north of Oakhurst, surrounded by the Sierra National Forest.

Mariposa County is one of only three California counties with no incorporated cities at all, so Fish Camp - like every community in the county - is unincorporated.

The place got its name in 1881, when Annie Philp took up a 640-acre timber claim along Big Creek and reportedly called it Fish Camp because of the number of fish caught there; her husband Albert built a two-story hotel on the site in 1883.

Fish Camp was also known as Summerdale, where a post office operated from 1893 to 1908, and by the names Happy Camp and Berry's Fish Camp.

Native people used the Big Creek area seasonally for thousands of years - archaeology at Fish Camp has found evidence of occupation dating back about 5,000 years, including obsidian traded across the Sierra Nevada.

Logging shaped early Fish Camp: after the Madera Sugar Pine Company was incorporated in 1899 and built its principal mill at nearby Sugar Pine, its logging railroad ran through the Fish Camp area.

The Yosemite Mountain Sugar Pine Railroad has carried tourists over about four miles of that old logging railroad since 1967, running Shay steam locomotives and a museum devoted to the area's logging history.

Tenaya at Yosemite, the community's large resort, opened in 1990 as a 242-room lodge and has been owned and operated by Delaware North since 2001.

Only 49 people lived in Fish Camp at the 2020 census, down from 59 in 2010, in 29 households - and of its 154 housing units, only 29 were occupied, reflecting its vacation-home and resort character.