JOHN MUIR Ultimate Collection: Travel Memoirs, Wilderness Essays, Environmental Studies & Letters (Illustrated) E-Book
John Muir
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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
In "JOHN MUIR Ultimate Collection: Travel Memoirs, Wilderness Essays, Environmental Studies & Letters (Illustrated)," readers are invited into the rich landscapes of nature through Muir's eloquent prose. This comprehensive anthology presents a harmonious blend of travel memoirs, reflective essays, and passionate letters that encapsulate the spirit of the American wilderness. Muir's literary style, infused with vivid imagery and lyrical cadences, evokes an intimate connection between humanity and nature, while his environmental studies provide a prescient framework for understanding humanity's role within ecology. The contextual backdrop of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, marked by burgeoning industrialization, resonates with his urgent calls to conserve the natural world. John Muir (1838-1914), often referred to as the "Father of the National Parks," dedicated his life to wilderness advocacy, and his experiences as a naturalist deeply informed his writings. A Scottish immigrant, Muir's transformative encounters with the wilds of North America fueled his passion for environmental stewardship. His establishment of the Sierra Club, along with his relentless campaigns for national parks, reflect a profound commitment to preserving the beauty he so eloquently articulated in his works. This ultimate collection is an essential read for anyone seeking inspiration from nature and a deeper understanding of environmental philosophy. Muir's timeless reflections resonate in our modern context, inviting readers to reconnect with the natural world and consider the significant role of conservation. Whether you are an environmentalist, a lover of memoirs, or simply seeking solace in nature's beauty, Muir's writings will captivate and inspire. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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JOHN MUIR Ultimate Collection: Travel Memoirs, Wilderness Essays, Environmental Studies & Letters (Illustrated)
Table of Contents
Introduction
This single-author collection gathers the full sweep of John Muir’s major books together with shorter pieces, personal correspondence, and a contemporary tribute, offering a panoramic view of his life’s work. It brings into one volume his sustained encounters with mountains, forests, rivers, and glaciers, and the arguments he fashioned for their care. The purpose is not merely to assemble titles but to present a coherent record of observation, reflection, and advocacy that helped define an American literary and environmental tradition. The inclusion of illustrations underscores Muir’s commitment to seeing clearly, inviting readers to match words with the forms and textures of wild places.
The volume spans multiple genres and text types: book-length travel narratives and topographical studies; wilderness essays and scientific papers; public addresses and polemical articles; personal letters; an autobiography; and a tribute written by a close associate. Works such as The Mountains of California, Our National Parks, The Yosemite, Travels in Alaska, and Steep Trails draw on extended field experience. Articles and speeches sharpen policy aims and scientific claims. Letters to a Friend reveals private rhythms and concerns. The Story of My Boyhood and Youth supplies formative context. Alaska Days with John Muir by Samuel Hall Young adds an external, corroborating perspective.
Across these varied forms, several unifying themes emerge. Muir treats wild nature as a teacher, worthy of patient attention and ethical regard. He blends close observation with accessible prose, insisting that the particular—an ice-polished granite dome, a snow-bent fir, a tide-riven inlet—can disclose larger patterns of geology and climate. He writes to share delight, to record evidence, and to influence public policy, with all three aims mutually reinforcing. What binds the collection is this integrated method: field-based inquiry, narrative immediacy, and a persistent call to preserve outstanding landscapes for their intrinsic value and for the benefit of future generations.
The Sierra Nevada, and especially Yosemite, form the axial line of the collection. The Mountains of California and The Yosemite combine descriptive power with clear exposition, presenting mountain architecture, plant communities, and weather with practiced precision. Companion pieces—Studies in the Sierra, Yosemite Glaciers, Yosemite in Winter, Yosemite in Spring, The Treasures of the Yosemite, and Features of the Proposed Yosemite National Park—extend the picture, from seasonal portraits to discussions of glacial processes and park boundaries. Read together, these works document Muir’s sustained argument that ice shaped the region’s forms, and they display how aesthetics, science, and stewardship can reinforce one another.
From those granite valleys, the view widens to national scale. Our National Parks articulates a comprehensive vision of protected landscapes open to public enjoyment and scientific study. The National Parks and Forest Reservations distills this into the register of public address, clarifying uses and safeguards. Save the Redwoods concentrates attention on coastal forests whose majesty and ecological significance demand protection. The Grand Cañon of the Colorado offers a measured, first-hand account of a distinct geological province. Together these writings show Muir translating fieldcraft into civic language, pressing for policy that meets the grandeur of the land with appropriate, enduring care.
Muir’s travel memoirs supply narrative momentum and a sense of discovery. My First Summer in the Sierra records a season of shepherding and study in the high country, setting the pattern for later field seasons. A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf recounts a long pedestrian journey across the American South to the Gulf of Mexico, attentive to plants, waters, and weather. Travels in Alaska compiles journeys along coasts and inlets, attentive to glaciers and native flora. The Cruise of the Corwin preserves observations from an Arctic voyage. Each text balances route and reflection, recording what sustained attention can yield day by day.
Shorter narratives and essays show Muir at his most concentrated. Stickeen: The Story of a Dog captures the character and companionship revealed in a challenging Alaskan excursion. Snow-Storm on Mount Shasta places readers inside a mountain storm, conveying the hazards and exhilaration of winter travel. Steep Trails gathers pieces from across the American West, from volcanic plateaus to desert ranges, demonstrating how the thread of attentive walking ties disparate terrains together. These works complement the larger books by delivering distilled episodes that illustrate judgment in the field, the dynamics of weather and terrain, and the rewards of steady observation.
Picturesque California emphasizes the interplay of image and text. Bringing together literary description and visual art, it demonstrates Muir’s belief that careful looking precedes careful thinking. The present collection continues that practice by incorporating illustrations that echo the contours, surfaces, and atmospheres he describes. Images here do not replace the text; they confirm it, mapping granite ribs, forest canopies, glacier lines, and coastal profiles that feature prominently in the prose. For readers, this pairing offers a double entry into the material world: one through the cadence of Muir’s sentences, the other through visual cues that anchor and clarify.
Personal and commemorative pieces widen the frame from landscapes to relationships. Letters to a Friend preserves a more intimate register—traces of reading, planning, field logistics, and the temper of daily life—revealing how major journeys and publications took shape in correspondence. Short profiles such as Edward Henry Harriman and Edward Taylor Parsons acknowledge figures connected with exploration and conservation, noting the networks through which ideas traveled. As a complementary perspective, Alaska Days with John Muir by Samuel Hall Young offers reminiscences by a contemporary observer, documenting shared travels and conversations. These works humanize Muir’s public voice, setting advocacy within lived communities.
Autobiographical material anchors the collection in the making of a naturalist. The Story of My Boyhood and Youth traces early experiences that shaped Muir’s habits of attention and resilience—work, study, and encounters with local landscapes that prepared him for longer expeditions. It clarifies how handcraft, observation, and perseverance became the tools he carried into the Sierra, Alaska, and beyond. Read alongside the travel books and scientific essays, the autobiography reveals continuities of method and purpose: the same patient curiosity, the same drive to connect small facts with large patterns, and the same resolve to write plainly from first-hand experience.
Stylistically, Muir is notable for lucid description, exact naming, and narrative pacing that mirrors the rhythms of fieldwork. He blends careful measurements with metaphorical reach, yet he remains anchored to what can be seen, touched, and recorded. His essays typically move from particular scene to general pattern and then to ethical inference, inviting readers to adopt a similar sequence in their own thinking. Throughout, the tone is inviting rather than exclusive, opening scientific topics—glaciation, forest succession, mountain weather—to general audiences. The result is a body of work that is both literary and instructive, persuasive without sacrificing precision.
The significance of these writings lies in their durable fusion of observation, narrative, and public argument. They helped shape a broad appreciation for mountains, forests, and rivers as common goods to be studied and safeguarded. They also model how to read a landscape—slowly, attentively, with a readiness to let facts revise opinions. Readers may approach this collection thematically or chronologically, pairing field narratives with scientific essays and policy addresses. However arranged, the materials illuminate one another. With text and image in concert, the collection invites a renewed encounter with wild nature and a considered understanding of its preservation.
Author Biography
John Muir (1838–1914) was a Scottish-born American naturalist, writer, and advocate for the preservation of wild lands. Active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, he helped shape the United States conservation movement through vivid prose, field science, and public persuasion. His essays and books about the Sierra Nevada, Alaska, and national parks reached wide audiences, and his leadership in establishing the Sierra Club linked literary influence to organized advocacy. Muir’s combination of close observation, geological insight, and a reverent, often spiritual, appreciation of nature made him one of the era’s most recognizable voices for protecting mountains, forests, and rivers from unchecked development.
Muir was born in Dunbar, Scotland, and immigrated to the United States as a child, growing up on the Wisconsin frontier. He showed early talent for mechanical invention and a persistent curiosity about plants and landscapes. Long hours of farm labor were balanced by self-directed study and exploratory walks, which nurtured habits of close observation that later defined his writing. Without dwelling on private details, it is clear that the rigors of rural life and exposure to Midwestern prairies shaped his belief that nature was both teacher and sanctuary. These formative experiences prepared him for the sustained fieldwork and disciplined note‑keeping that anchored his career.
In the early 1860s Muir attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison, informally studying botany, geology, and chemistry. Encouragement from teachers, including the botanist Ezra Carr, reinforced a method of learning rooted in observation rather than formal credentials. A serious factory accident in the late 1860s, which temporarily damaged his eyesight, redirected him toward a life outdoors. On recovering, he walked from the Midwest to the Gulf of Mexico, an experience later recounted in A Thousand‑Mile Walk to the Gulf. Reading transcendentalist writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau deepened his conviction that scientific inquiry and ethical regard for wild nature belonged together.
By 1868 Muir had reached California and soon entered the Sierra Nevada, where Yosemite Valley became his principal field laboratory. He worked seasonal jobs that allowed long periods in the high country, keeping detailed journals and sketchbooks. Beginning in the early 1870s he published articles in the Overland Monthly and other periodicals, arguing from evidence that glaciers, not a catastrophic flood, had carved Yosemite—a position that challenged prevailing academic opinion. During a visit to Yosemite, Emerson met Muir, a moment often cited as symbolic of the exchange between American literary tradition and emergent conservation. Muir’s reputation grew as a field naturalist and persuasive essayist.
Muir translated years of notebooks into books that reached general audiences. The Mountains of California (1894) combined geology, botany, and narrative to present the Sierra’s forms and life. Our National Parks (1901) offered an accessible defense of the park idea. The popular animal narrative Stickeen (1909) showcased his storytelling, while My First Summer in the Sierra (1911) and The Yosemite (1912) distilled earlier journal work. Additional volumes, including Travels in Alaska and A Thousand‑Mile Walk to the Gulf, appeared posthumously. Critics noted his lyrical style and empirical care; scientists, writers, and policymakers alike cited his work as evidence for preservation in the public interest.
As his readership expanded, Muir moved from solitary observer to public advocate. In 1892 he helped found the Sierra Club and served as its first president, giving organizational focus to campaigns for Yosemite, Sequoia, and other protected areas. He advised and corresponded with civic leaders and met with President Theodore Roosevelt, whose Yosemite visit in the early 1900s became emblematic of federal commitment to parks. Muir argued for preserving certain landscapes from commercial exploitation, a stance that sometimes conflicted with utilitarian conservation. The long fight over damming the Hetch Hetchy Valley, which he opposed, clarified philosophical lines that still shape environmental debates.
Muir divided later years between writing, travel, and periods on a California fruit ranch. He returned repeatedly to Alaska to study glaciers and coastal forests, and he undertook global journeys that broadened his comparative perspective on mountain and forest systems. He died in 1914, leaving a body of prose that continues to be read for its scientific attentiveness and literary power. His legacy endures in the Sierra Club and in places that bear his name, such as Muir Woods National Monument and the John Muir Trail. Today his work informs environmental ethics, park stewardship, and nature writing, inviting readers to attend closely to living landscapes.
Historical Context
John Muir’s writings emerged from a life that spanned immense transformations in the United States. Born in Dunbar, Scotland, in 1838, he immigrated to Wisconsin in 1849, studied intermittently at the University of Wisconsin (1860–1863), and turned to wide-ranging field exploration after a blinding factory accident in Indianapolis in 1867. That year’s thousand-mile walk to the Gulf, later published posthumously, initiated decades of travel writing and scientific inquiry. Muir reached California in 1868, began Sierra field seasons in 1869–1871, married Louisa Strentzel in 1880, and settled in Martinez while continuing research and advocacy. He died in Los Angeles on December 24, 1914, leaving a vast manuscript legacy.
Muir’s oeuvre developed amid the nation-building surge after the Civil War. Federal policies such as the Homestead Act of 1862 and the Pacific Railroad Acts accelerated settlement, industry, and tourism—forces that shaped landscapes he chronicled in The Mountains of California (1894) and The Yosemite (1912). The Yosemite Grant (1864) and Yellowstone’s establishment (1872) introduced the park idea, providing a legal vocabulary for arguments refined in Our National Parks (1901) and later speeches. Mining booms, timber extraction, and irrigation projects remade the American West, their pressures visible in essays spanning Picturesque California (1888–1890) to Hetch Hetchy–era writings, and forming the social backdrop to his preservationist appeals.
The California Gold Rush (1848–1855) and subsequent resource frontiers profoundly influenced Muir’s subjects and tone. Hydraulic mining scarred river systems he would traverse; sheep grazing—“hoofed locusts,” in his phrase—degraded meadows central to My First Summer in the Sierra (1911). San Francisco’s rapid growth fueled calls for water and power, turning high valleys like Hetch Hetchy into contested public spaces. Meanwhile, new roads and resorts in Yosemite and the Sierra enlarged audiences for descriptive works such as The Treasures of the Yosemite and Yosemite in Spring. Muir’s prose registers both the exuberance of settlement and the accelerating costs to forests, watersheds, and wildlife.
Muir wrote during pivotal debates in American science. His Studies in the Sierra essays (Overland Monthly, 1874–1875) and Yosemite Glaciers papers challenged geologist Josiah Dwight Whitney’s catastrophic-origin theory of the valley, advancing glacial excavation instead—an argument consonant with Ice Age thinking after Louis Agassiz. He conducted field measurements at moraines, polished pavements, and active ice, extending the debate beyond Yosemite to the broader Sierra Nevada. These controversies inform later syntheses in The Mountains of California and The Yosemite. Muir’s scientific cast of mind also undergirds Travels in Alaska (1915), where glacier dynamics, tree-line patterns, and coastal geomorphology enrich his narrative of exploration and encounter.
The period’s publishing ecosystem—regional magazines, national monthlies, and illustrated gift books—shaped how Muir’s ideas circulated. Overland Monthly introduced his Sierra essays; Scribner’s Monthly and The Century Magazine, guided by editor Robert Underwood Johnson, brought them to a national readership and into policy conversations. Pieces such as Features of the Proposed Yosemite National Park (1890) and The National Parks and Forest Reservations (1895 address) exemplify this interface of letters and legislation. Snow-Storm on Mount Shasta, Yosemite in Winter, and A Rival of the Yosemite appeared alongside travel sketches that later fed A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf (1916) and Steep Trails (1918), reflecting a pipeline from article to book.
Muir’s work moved through, and contributed to, a powerful visual culture of the American sublime. Picturesque California (1888–1890), which he helped edit and to which he contributed, assembled engravings and essays on western scenery, aligning him with painters William Keith and Thomas Moran and photographers Carleton Watkins and Eadweard Muybridge. Such images, often disseminated by railroads and magazines, shaped tourist expectations and political will for “scenery reserves.” This aesthetic politics also informs The Grand Cañon of the Colorado and the descriptive chapters of Our National Parks. By situating scientific observation within a tradition of the picturesque and sublime, Muir made preservation legible to readers and lawmakers alike.
The founding of the Sierra Club in San Francisco in 1892 institutionalized Muir’s coupling of exploration and advocacy. As president from 1892 to 1914, he found allies like Edward Taylor Parsons, later memorialized by Muir, who mobilized the club’s Bulletin, outings, and legal strategies. The club provided a platform for essays on Yosemite’s boundaries, forest reservations, and redwoods, and it connected his books—The Mountains of California, Our National Parks, The Yosemite—to campaigns on grazing, logging, and dam proposals. This civic infrastructure made possible coordinated responses to threats like the Hetch Hetchy project, and established norms of member-based conservation that endured beyond Muir’s lifetime.
Progressive Era conservation framed Muir’s mature public voice. The Forest Reserve Act (1891) and the Transfer Act (1905) created national forests under Gifford Pinchot’s utilitarian management, emphasizing sustained yield and watershed protection. Muir’s preservationist ethics, articulated in addresses like The National Parks and Forest Reservations (1895), often clashed with this instrumentalism, advocating inviolable parks and monuments. President Theodore Roosevelt’s 1903 camping trip with Muir in Yosemite symbolized the union of executive power and scenic preservation, later expressed through the Antiquities Act of 1906. The policy environment helps explain both the successes in park expansion and the failures—most notably at Hetch Hetchy—that Muir’s writings chronicle.
Yosemite’s administrative evolution provides a recurring context. The 1864 state grant created a commission to manage Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove, while the 1890 federal act established Yosemite National Park around the state enclave. Muir’s essays—Features of the Proposed Yosemite National Park, Yosemite in Winter and Spring, and later The Yosemite (1912)—press for scientific boundary-making, grazing controls, and road policies attuned to scenery and wildlife. As hotels, carriage roads, and rail connections grew, he calibrated his rhetoric between welcome and warning. The Yosemite’s blend of guidebook, natural history, and polemic reflects decades of argument over what a national park should be and do.
Alaska, purchased by the United States from Russia in 1867, offered Muir a laboratory for glaciology and a frontier for American identity. His canoe journeys from Fort Wrangell in 1879 and 1880 with Tlingit guides and missionary Samuel Hall Young yielded observations later shaped into Travels in Alaska (1915) and the tale Stickeen (first published 1897), set on the Taku Glacier. The 1881 voyage aboard the revenue cutter Corwin under Captain Calvin L. Hooper, searching Arctic waters for missing expeditions, generated journals published posthumously as The Cruise of the Corwin (1917). Together, these works locate Muir within imperial, scientific, and missionary networks on the Pacific Rim.
Railroad expansion both threatened and enabled the landscapes Muir wrote about. The transcontinental line opened in 1869; branch lines later reached Yosemite’s gateways and the Grand Canyon, whose El Tovar Hotel opened in 1905 under the Santa Fe Railway. Essays like The Grand Cañon of the Colorado intersect with this promotional geography, while Steep Trails gathers travel across the Sierra, the Great Basin, and the Pacific Northwest, often along rail corridors. Railroad magnate Edward Henry Harriman, memorialized by Muir after his 1909 death, exemplifies the era’s paradox: infrastructure that accelerated resource extraction also bankrolled scientific expeditions and disseminated scenic imagery crucial to preservation campaigns.
The 1906 San Francisco earthquake intensified demands for reliable municipal water, placing the Hetch Hetchy Valley at the center of a national debate. Muir and the Sierra Club opposed damming within Yosemite National Park, publishing The Hetch Hetchy Valley and allied essays in the Sierra Club Bulletin and national magazines. Congressional hearings between 1908 and 1913 pitted preservationists and editor Robert Underwood Johnson against city engineers and Progressive reformers. Despite sustained advocacy, President Woodrow Wilson signed the Raker Act on December 19, 1913. Muir’s writings from this period document a maturing conservation movement, its coalition-building, and its limits when confronted by urban-industrial imperatives.
Muir’s domestic life in Martinez after his 1880 marriage to Louisa Strentzel connected him to California’s booming agricultural economy. Managing fruit orchards, he observed irrigation regimes, labor systems, and markets tying the Sierra snowpack to coastal cities—a nexus that informs Our National Parks and policy speeches. The ranch became a literary workshop where he revised field journals from the Sierra, Alaska, and the Southeast into books, while hosting visitors from universities, magazines, and government. This half-agrarian, half-literary existence reflects the era’s blending of boosterism and reform, and the practical knowledge of water, soil, and climate that grounds his arguments for protected reserves.
Mentorships and scholarly networks explain the texture of Muir’s prose and the trajectory of his career. Correspondence with Jeanne Carr, gathered in Letters to a Friend (1915), records encouragements that brought his early manuscripts to editors and introduced him to botanists like Asa Gray and geologist Joseph LeConte. These ties bridged amateur fieldwork and formal science, strengthening publications such as Studies in the Sierra and Yosemite Glaciers. Robert Underwood Johnson’s editorial friendship shaped national advocacy, while Sierra Club colleagues like Edward Taylor Parsons provided organizational muscle. Such relationships help situate The Story of My Boyhood and Youth (1913) within a public life consciously crafted for reform.
Muir’s travel narratives unfold amid Indigenous homelands and colonial institutions. In Alaska he traveled with Tlingit men, recorded place names, and relied on mission outposts like Fort Wrangell, experiences refracted in Travels in Alaska and retold in Samuel Hall Young’s Alaska Days with John Muir (1915). In the Southwest and Great Basin, routes traversed territories of Diné, Paiute, and others, later touched by tourism and federal land designations. His portrayals range from admiration to paternalism, reflecting nineteenth-century ethnographic conventions even as he learned from local guides. Recognizing these contexts clarifies the social realities behind set pieces like Stickeen and the broader geography of Steep Trails.
Many titles in this collection were published or assembled after Muir’s death, shaped by editors, family, and club colleagues. William Frederic Badè, a Berkeley scholar and Sierra Club leader, prepared Travels in Alaska (1915), A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf (1916), The Cruise of the Corwin (1917), and Steep Trails (1918) from journals, letters, and magazine pieces. Letters to a Friend (1915) and memorial tributes, including essays on Edward Henry Harriman and Edward Taylor Parsons (d. 1914), fixed a public memory of Muir as scientist, prophet, and organizer. The editorial filtration of field notes into coherent books influenced how subsequent generations read his science and politics together.
The legacies activated by these works extended far beyond Muir’s lifetime. Muir Woods National Monument (1908) on Mount Tamalpais, donated by William and Elizabeth Kent, honored his name; the National Park Service formed in 1916, a reform partly galvanized by the Hetch Hetchy defeat. The Save-the-Redwoods movement crystallized in 1918 with a league of scientists and philanthropists, echoing Muir’s earlier calls in Save the Redwoods. The John Muir Trail, initiated in 1915, and later expansions of parks in the Sierra, Grand Canyon, and Alaska carried forward ideas first argued in Our National Parks, The Yosemite, and Travels in Alaska, entwining literature with enduring public lands.
Synopsis (Selection)
PICTURESQUE CALIFORNIA
An illustrated survey of California and the American West that Muir edited and introduced, blending travel sketches with natural history to showcase grand scenery and advance preservation-minded appreciation.
THE MOUNTAINS OF CALIFORNIA
A portrait of the Sierra Nevada and other California ranges, detailing glaciers, forests, storms, and wildlife while advancing Muir’s argument that glaciers sculpted landscapes like Yosemite.
OUR NATIONAL PARKS
Descriptive tours of America’s early parks and forest reserves paired with a forceful case for stronger protection from logging and grazing and for expanding the national park system.
MY FIRST SUMMER IN THE SIERRA
A journal of Muir’s 1869 season herding sheep in the Sierra Nevada, recording daily botanical and geological discoveries that crystallize his spiritual view of wild nature.
THE YOSEMITE
A comprehensive natural and practical guide to Yosemite Valley and its high country, covering geology, waterfalls, trees, seasons, and routes while championing full protection of places like Hetch Hetchy.
TRAVELS IN ALASKA
Accounts of multiple trips along Alaska’s coasts and glaciers, with canoe voyages among Indigenous communities and detailed studies of ice, forests, and fjords that helped shape American glaciology.
STICKEEN: THE STORY OF A DOG
A gripping true tale of a perilous glacier crossing in Alaska shared with a small dog, highlighting courage, intelligence, and companionship forged in the wild.
THE CRUISE OF THE CORWIN
Field notes from Muir’s 1881 voyage to the Arctic aboard the revenue cutter Corwin, observing sea ice, volcanic islands, flora and fauna, and coastal peoples during a search-and-rescue mission.
A THOUSAND-MILE WALK TO THE GULF
The travel journal of Muir’s 1867 walk through the post–Civil War South to Florida, focused on plant collecting and landscape observation across swamps, forests, and shorelines.
STEEP TRAILS
A posthumous collection of Western travel essays ranging from the Great Basin and Cascades to Mount Shasta, emphasizing geology, forests, and weather seen from rugged routes.
STUDIES IN SIERRA
Muir’s early scientific papers on the Sierra Nevada presenting evidence for extensive past glaciation and active glaciers, with detailed accounts of moraines, polished rock, and valley forms.
Yosemite Essays and Advocacy (Features of the Proposed Yosemite National Park; A Rival of the Yosemite; The Treasures of the Yosemite; Yosemite Glaciers; Yosemite in Winter; Yosemite in Spring; The Hetch Hetchy Valley)
A suite of essays depicting Yosemite’s seasons, geology, waterfalls, and the companion valley Hetch Hetchy; they outline park boundaries, celebrate scenic and ecological treasures, and argue for strict protection against development and damming.
Conservation Policy Speeches and Articles (The National Parks and Forest Reservations; Save the Redwoods)
Programmatic pleas for federal stewardship of public lands, calling for creation and enlargement of parks and reserves, regulated forest use, and urgent preservation of the coast redwood groves.
Western Landmark Essays (Snow-Storm on Mount Shasta; The Grand Cañon of the Colorado)
Dramatic portrayals of two emblematic Western landscapes—the perils and awe of an alpine blizzard on Mount Shasta, and the Grand Canyon’s vast stratified chasm—emphasizing sublime geology and weather.
Tributes and Memorials (Edward Henry Harriman; Edward Taylor Parsons)
Short memorials honoring the expedition patron E. H. Harriman and Sierra Club leader E. T. Parsons, noting their characters and contributions to exploration and conservation.
THE STORY OF MY BOYHOOD AND YOUTH
Muir’s recollection of his childhood in Scotland and frontier Wisconsin, chronicling stern upbringing, inventive tinkering, and early encounters with nature that shaped his life’s course.
LETTERS TO A FRIEND
Personal correspondence tracing Muir’s travels, scientific ideas, and conservation efforts, offering candid glimpses of his methods, moods, and relationships.
ALASKA DAYS WITH JOHN MUIR by Samuel Hall Young
A companion’s memoir of journeys with Muir in Alaska—including the Stickeen episode—portraying his field habits, sense of adventure, and relations with Indigenous guides and missionaries.
JOHN MUIR Ultimate Collection: Travel Memoirs, Wilderness Essays, Environmental Studies & Letters (Illustrated)
Books
PICTURESQUE CALIFORNIA
Table of Contents
I. Peaks and Glaciers of the High Sierra
Looking across the broad, level plain of the Sacramento and San Joaquin from the summit of the Coast Range opposite San Francisco, after the sky has been washed by the winter rains, the lofty Sierra may be seen throughout nearly its whole extent, stretching in simple grandeur along the edge of the plain, like an immense wall, four hundred miles long and two and a half miles high, colored in four horizontal bands; the lowest rose-purple of exquisite beauty of tone, the next higher dark purple, the next blue, and the highest pearl-white--all delicately interblending with each other and with the pale luminous sky and the golden yellow of the plain, and varying in tone with the time of day and the advance of the season.
The thousand landscapes of the Sierra are thus beheld in one view, massed into one sublime picture, and such is the marvelous purity of the atmosphere it seems as near and clear as a painting hung on a parlor wall. But nothing can you see or hear of all the happy life it holds, or of its lakes and meadows and lavish abundance of white falling water. The majestic range with all its treasures hidden stretches still and silent as the sunshine that covers it.
The rose-purple zone rising smoothly out of the yellow plain is the torrid foothill region, comprehending far the greater portion of the gold-bearing rocks of the range, and the towns mills, and ditches of the miners--a waving stretch of comparatively low, rounded hills and ridges, cut into sections by the main river canyons, roughened here and there with outcropping masses of red and grey slates, and rocky gold gulches rugged and riddled; the whole faintly shaded by a sparse growth of oaks, and patches of scrubby ceanothus and manzanita chaparral. Specks of cultivation are scattered from end to end of the zone in fertile flats and hollows far apart--rose embowered cottages, small glossy orange groves, vineyards and orchards, and sweet-scented hay fields, mostly out of sight, and making scarce any appreciable mark on the landscape in wide general views; a paradise of flowers and bees and bland purple skies during the spring months--dusty, sunbeaten, parched and bare all the rest of the year. The dark-purple and blue zones are the region of the giant pines and sequoia and silver-firs, forming the noblest coniferous forests on the face of the globe. They are everywhere vocal with running water and drenched with delightful sunshine. Miles of tangled bushes are blooming beneath them, and lily gardens, and meadows, and damp ferny glens in endless variety of color and richness, compelling the admiration of every beholder. Sweeping on over the ridges and valleys they extend a continuous belt from end to end of the range, only slightly interrupted at intervals of fifteen and twenty miles by tremendous canyons 3,000 to 5,000 feet in depth. Into these main river-canyons innumerable side-canyons and gorges open, occupied by bouncing, dancing, rejoicing cascades, making haste to join the rivers, which, grey with foam, are beating their way with resistless energy to the lowlands and the sea. All these waters sounding together give glorious animation to the onlooking forests, and to the stem, rocky grandeur of the canyon-walls. There too, almost directly opposite our point of view, is the farfamed Yosemite Valley and to right and left on the same zone many other valleys of the same type, some of them, though but little known as yet, not a whit less interesting, either in regard to the sublimity of their architecture, or the grandeur and beauty of their falling waters.
Above the upper edge of the silver-fir zone, the forest is maintained by smaller pines and spruces, that sweep on higher around lakes and meadows, and over smooth waves of outspread moraines, until, dwarfed and storm-bent, the utmost limit of tree growth is reached at a height of from 10,000 to 12,000 feet. While far above the bravest climbers of them all, rises the lofty, snow-laden, icy Sierra, composed of a vast wilderness of peaks, and crests, and splintered spires, swept by torrents and avalanches, and separated by deep gorges and notches and wide amphitheaters, the treasuries of the snow and fountain-heads of the rivers, holding in their dark mysterious recesses all that is left of the grand system of glaciers that once covered the entire range. During many years of faithful explorations in the Sierra, sixty-five glaciers have been discovered and studied, and it is not likely that many more will be found. Over two-thirds of the entire number lie between Lat. 36° 30' and 39°, sheltered from the wasting sunshine on the northern slopes of the highest peaks, where the snowfall on which they depend is most concentrated and abundant.
Nothing was known of the existence of active glaciers in the Sierra until October, 1871, when I made the discovery of Black Mountain Glacier and measured its movements. It lies near the head of a wide shadowy basin between Red and Black Mountains, two of the dominating summits of the Merced Group. This group consists of the highest portion of a spur that straggles out from the main axis of the chain near Mount Ritter, in the direction of Yosemite Valley. Its western slopes are drained by Illilouette Creek, a tributary of the Merced, which pours its waters into Yosemite in a fine fall bearing the same name as the stream.
No excursion can be made into the Sierra that may not prove an enduring blessing. Notwithstanding the great height of the summits, and the ice and the snow, and the gorges and canyons and sheer giddy precipices, no mountain chain on the globe is more kindly and approachable. Visions of ineffable beauty and harmony, health and exhilaration of body and soul, and grand foundation lessons in Nature's eternal love are the sure reward of every earnest looker in this glorious wilderness.
The Yosemite Valley is a fine hall of entrance to one or the highest and most interesting portions of the Sierra the head or the Merced, Tuolumne, San Joaquin, and Owens rivers. The necessary outfit may be procured here, in the way of pack animals, provisions, etc., and trails lead from the valley towards Mounts Dana, Lyell, and Ritter, and the Mono Pass; and also into the lower portion of the Illilouette Basin.
Going to the Black Mountain Glacier, only a few days' provision is required, and a pair of blankets, if you are not accustomed to sleeping by a camp-fire without them.
Leaving the valley by the trail leading past the Vernal and Nevada falls, you cross the lower end of Little Yosemite Valley, and climb the Starr King Ridge, from which you obtain a fine general view of the Illilouette Basin, with its grand array of peaks and domes and dark spirey forests--all on a grand scale of magnitude, yet keenly fine in finish and beauty. Forming one of the most interesting of the basins that lie round about Yosemite Valley, they pour their tribute of songful water into it, swelling the anthems ever sounding there.
The glacier is not visible from this standpoint, but the two mountains between which it lies make a faithful mark, and you can hardly go wrong, however inexperienced in mountain ways.
Going down into the heart of the basin, through beds of zauchneria, and manzanita chaparral, where the bears love to feed, you follow the main stream past a series of cascades and falls until you find yourself between the two lateral moraines that come sweeping down in curves from the shoulders of Red and Black mountains. These henceforth will be your guide, for they belonged to the grand old glacier, of which Black Mountain Glacier is a remnant, one that has endured until now the change of climate which has transformed a wilderness of ice and snow into a wilderness of warm exuberant life. Pushing on over this glacial highway you pass lake after lake set in solid basins of granite, and many a well-watered meadow where the deer with their young love to hide; now clanking over smooth shining rock where not a leaf tries to grow, now wading plushy bogs knee deep in yellow and purple sphagnum, or brushing through luxuriant garden patches among larkspurs eight feet high and lilies with thirty flowers on a single stalk. The lateral moraines bounding the view on either side are like artificial embankments, and are covered with a superb growth of silver-firs and pines, many specimens attaining a height of 200 feet or more.
But this garden and forest luxuriance is soon left behind. The trees are dwarfed, the gardens become exclusively alpine, patches of the heath-like bryanthus and cassiope begin to appear, and arctic willows pressed into flat close carpets by the weight of the winter snow. The lakes, which a few miles down the valley are so deeply embedded in the tall woods, or embroidered with flowery meadows, have here, at an elevation of 10,000 feet above sea level, only thin mats of carex, leaving bare glaciated rock bosses around more than half their shores. Yet amid all this alpine suppression, the sturdy brown-barked mountain pine is seen tossing his storm-beaten branches on edges and buttresses of Red Mountain, some specimens over a hundred feet high and twenty-four feet in circumference, seemingly as fresh and vigorous as if made wholly of sunshine and snow. If you have walked well and have not lingered among the beauties of the way, evening will be coming on as you enter the grand fountain amphitheater in which the glacier lies. It is about a mile wide in the middle, and rather less than two miles long. Crumbling spurs and battlements of Red Mountain bound it on the north, the sombre rudely sculptured precipices of Black Mountain on the south, and a hacked and splintered col curves around from mountain to mountain at the head, shutting it in on the east.
You will find a good campground on the brink of a glacier lake, where a thicket of Williamson spruce affords shelter from the night wind, and wood for your fire.
As the night advances the mighty rocks looming darkly about you seem to come nearer, and the starry sky stretches across from wall to wall, fitting closely down into all the spiky irregularities of the summits in most impressive grandeur. Then, as you lie by your fireside, gazing into this strange weird beauty, you fall into the clear, death-like sleep that comes to the tired mountaineer.
In the early morning the mountain voices are hushed, the night wind dies away, and scarce a leaf stirs in the groves. The birds that dwell here, and the marmots, are still crouching in their nests. The stream, cascading from pool to pool, seems alone to be awake and doing. But the spirit of the opening, blooming day calls to action. The sunbeams stream gloriously through jagged openings of the eastern wall, glancing on ice-burnished pavements, and lighting the mirror surface of the lake, while every sunward rock and pinnacle bums white on the edges like melting iron in a furnace.
Passing round the northern shore of the lake, and tracing the stream that feeds it back into its upper recesses, you are led past a chain of small lakes set on bare granite benches and connected by cascades and falls. Here the scenery becomes more rigidly arctic. The last dwarf pine is left far below, and the streams are bordered with icicles. The sun now with increasing warmth loosens rock masses on shattered portions of the wall that come bounding down gullies and couloirs in dusty, spattering avalanches, echoing wildly from crag to crag. The main lateral moraines, that stretch so formally from the huge jaws of the amphitheater into the middle of the basin, are continued along the upper walls in straggling masses wherever the declivity is sufficiently low to allow loose material to rest, while separate stones, thousands of tons in weight, are lying stranded here and there out in the middle of the channel. Here too you may observe well characterized frontal moraines ranged in regular order along the south wall of Black Mountain, the shape and size of each corresponding with the daily shadows cast by the wall above them.
Tracing the main stream back to the last of its chain of lakelets, you may notice that the stones on the bottom are covered with a deposit of fine grey mud, that has been ground from the rocks in the bed of the glacier and transported by its draining stream, which is seen issuing from the base of a raw, fresh looking moraine still in process of formation. Not a plant or weather-stain is visible on its rough unsettled surface. It is from 60 to more than 100 feet in height and plunges down in front at an angle of 38°, which is the steepest at which this form of moraine material will lie. Climbing it is therefore no easy undertaking. The slightest touch loosens ponderous blocks that go rumbling to the bottom, followed by a train of smaller stones and sand.
Cautiously picking your way, you at length gain the top, and there outspread in full view is the little giant glacier swooping down from the sombre precipices of Black Mountain in a finely graduated curve, fluent in all its lines, yet seemingly as rugged and immovable as the mountain against which it is leaning. The blue compact ice appears on all the lower portions of the glacier sprinkled with dirt and stones embedded in its surface. Higher, the ice disappears beneath coarsely granulated snow. The face is still further characterized by dirt bands and the outcropping edges of blue veins, that sweep across from side to side in beautiful concentric curves, showing the laminated structure of the mass; and at the head of the glacier where the névé joins the mountain it is traversed by a huge yawning bergschrund, in some places twelve to fourteen feet in width, and bridged at intervals by the remains of snow avalanches. Creeping along the lower edge holding on with benumbed fingers, clear sections are displayed where the bedded and ribbon structure of glaciers are beautifully illustrated. The surface snow, though everywhere sprinkled with stones shot down from the cliffs, is in some places almost pure white, gradually becoming crystalline, and changing to porous whitish ice of varying shades, and this again changing at a depth of 20 or 30 feet to blue, some of the ribbon-like bands of which are nearly pure and solid, and blend with the paler bands in the most gradual and exquisite manner imaginable, reminding one of the way that color bands come together in the rainbow.
Should you wish to descend into the weird ice-world of the 'schrund, you may find a way or make a way, by cutting steps with an axe. Its chambered hollows are hung with a multitude of clustered icicles, amidst which thin subdued light pulses and shimmers with ineffable loveliness. Water drips and tinkles among the icicles overhead, and from far below there come strange solemn murmurs from currents that are feeling their way in the darkness among veins and fissures on the bottom. Ice creations of this kind are perfectly enchanting, notwithstanding one feels strangely out of place in their cold fountain beauty. Dripping and shivering you are glad to seek the sunshine, though it is hard to turn away from the delicious music of the water, and the still more delicious beauty of the light in the crystal chambers. Coming again to the surface you may see stones of every size setting out on their downward journey with infinite deliberation, to be built into the terminal moraine. And now the noonday warmth gives birth to a network of sweet-voiced rills that run gracefully down the glacier, curling and swirling in their shining channels, and cutting clear sections in which the structure of the ice is beautifully revealed, their quick, gliding, glancing movements contrasting widely with the invisible flow of the glacier itself on whose back they are all riding. The series of frontal moraines noted further down, forming so striking a picture of the landscape, correspond in every particular with those of this active glacier; and the cause of their distribution with reference to shadows, is now plainly unfolded. When those climatic changes came on that broke up the main glacier that once filled the amphitheater from wall to wall, a series of residual glaciers was left in the cliff shadows, under whose protection they lingered until the terminal moraines under consideration were formed. But as the seasons became yet warmer, or the snow supply less abundant, they wasted and vanished in succession, all excepting the one we have just seen; and the causes of its longer life are manifest in the greater extent of snow in its more perfect shelter from the action of the sun. How much longer this little glacier will last to enrich the landscape will of course depend upon climate and the changes slowly effected in the form and exposure of its basin.
But now these same shadows reaching quite across the main basin and up the slopes of Red Mountain, mark the time for returning to camp, and also hint the ascent of the mountain next day, from whose summit glorious views are to be seen far down over the darkening woods, and north and south over the basins of Nevada Creek, and San Joaquin, with their shining lakes and lace of silvery streams, and eastward to the snowy Sierras, marshaled along the sky near enough to be intensely impressive. This ascent will occupy most of your third day, and on the fourth, sweeping around the southern boundary of the Illilouette Basin, and over the Glacier Point Ridge, you may reach your headquarters in Yosemite by way of the Glacier Point trail, thus completing one of the most telling trips one can make into the icy Yosemite fountains.
The glaciers lying at the head of the Tuolumne and North fork of the San Joaquin may also be reached from Yosemite, as well as many of the most interesting of the mountains, Mounts Dana, Lyell, Ritter, and Mammoth Mountain--the Mono Pass also, and Mono Lake and volcanoes on the eastern flank of the range. For this grand general excursion into the heart of the High Sierra, good legs and nerves are required, and great caution, and a free number of weeks. Then you may feel reasonably safe among the loose crags of the peaks and crevasses of the glaciers, and return to the lowlands and its cares, rich forever in mountain wealth beyond your most extravagant expectations.
The best time to go to the High Sierra is about the end of September, when the leaf colors are ripe, and the snow is in great part melted from the glaciers, revealing the crevasses that are hidden earlier in the season. Setting out with a pack-animal by the way of Vernal and Nevada falls at the lower end of Little Yosemite Valley, you will strike the old Mariposa and Mono Trail, which will lead you along the base of Clouds Rest, past Cathedral Peak, and down through beautiful forests into the Big Tuolumne Meadows. There, leaving the trail which crosses the meadows and makes direct for the head of the Mono Pass, you turn to the right and follow on up the meadow to its head near the base of Mount Lyell, where a central camp should be established, from which short excursions may be made under comfortable auspices to the adjacent peaks and glaciers.
Throughout the journey to the central camp you will be delighted with the intense azure of the sky, the fine purplish-grey tones of the granite, the reds and browns of dry meadows and the translucent purple and crimson of huckleberry bogs, the flaming yellow of aspen groves, the silvery flashing of the streams in their rocky channels, and the bright green and blue of the glacier lakes. But the general expression of the scenery is savage and bewildering to the lover of the picturesque. Threading the forests from ridge to ridge, and scanning the landscapes from every outlook, foregrounds, middle-grounds, backgrounds, sublime in magnitude, yet seem all alike bare rock waves, woods, groves, diminutive flecks of meadow and strips of shining water, pictures without lines of beginning or ending.
Cathedral Peak, grandly sculptured, a temple hewn from the living rock, of noble proportions and profusely spired, is the first peak that concentrates the attention. Then come the Tuolumne Meadows, a wide roomy stretch lying at a height of about 8,500 feet above the sea, smooth and lawn-like, with the noble forms of Mounts Dana and Gibbs in the distance, and curiously sculptured peaks on either side. But it is only towards evening of the second day from the valley, that in approaching the upper end of the meadows you gain a view of a truly beautiful and well-balanced picture. It is composed of one lofty group of snow-laden peaks, of which Mount Lyell is the center, with pine-fringed, granite bosses braided around its base, the whole surging free into the sky from the head of a magnificent valley, whose lofty walls are beveled away on both sides so as to embrace it all without admitting anything not strictly belonging to it.
The foreground is now aflame with autumn colors, brown, and purple, and gold, ripe and luminous in the mellow sunshine, contrasting brightly with the deep cobalt-blue of the sky, and the black and grey, and pure spiritual white of the rocks and glaciers. Down through the heart of the picture the young Tuolumne River is seen pouring from its crystal fountains, now resting in glassy pools as if changing back again into ice, now leaping in white cascades as if turning to snow, gliding right and left between granite bosses, then sweeping on through the smooth meadow levels of the valley, swaying pensively from side to side, with calm, stately gestures, past dipping sedges and willows, and around groves of arrowy pine; and throughout its whole eventful course, flowing however fast or slow, singing loud or low, ever filling the landscape with delightful animation, and manifesting the grandeur of its sources in every movement and tone.
The excursion to the top of Mount Lyell, 13,000 feet high, will take you through the midst of this alpine grandeur, and one day is all the time required. From your camp on the bank of the river you bear off up the right wall of the canyon and on direct to the glacier, keeping towards its western margin, so as to reach the west side of the extreme summit of the mountain where the ascent is least dangerous. The surface of the glacier is shattered with crevasses in some places; these, however, are easily avoided, but the sharp wave-like blades of granular snow covering a great part of the upper slopes during most of the season are exceedingly fatiguing, and are likely to stop any but the most determined climbers willing to stagger, stumble, and wriggle onward against every difficulty. The view from the summit overlooks the wilderness of peaks towards Mount Ritter, with their bright array of snow, and ice, and lakes; and northward Mount Dana, Castle Peak, Mammoth Mountain, and many others; westward, sweeping sheets of meadow, and heaving swells of ice-polished granite, and dark lines of forest and shadowy canyons towards Yosemite; while to eastward the view fades dimly among the sunbeaten deserts and ranges of the Great Basin. These grand mountain scriptures laid impressively open will make all your labor light, and you will return to camp braced and strengthened for yet grander things to come.
The excursion to Mount Ritter will take about three days from the Tuolumne Camp, some provision therefore will have to be carried, but no one will chafe under slight inconveniences while seeking so noble a mark. Ritter is king of all the giant summits hereabouts. Its height is about 13,300 feet, and it is guarded by steeply inclined glaciers, and canyons and gorges of tremendous depth and ruggedness, rendering it comparatively inaccessible. But difficulties of this kind only exhilarate the mountaineer.
Setting out from the Tuolumne, carrying bread, and an axe to cut steps in the glaciers, you go about a mile down the valley to the foot of a cascade that beats its way through a rugged gorge in the canyon wall from a height of about 900 feet, and pours its foaming waters into the river. Along the edge of this cascade you will find a charming way to the summit. Thence you cross the axis of the range and make your way southward along the eastern flank to the northern slopes of Ritter, conforming to the topography as best you can, for to push on directly through the peaks along the summit is impossible.
Climbing along the dashing border of the cascade, bathed from time to time in waftings of irised spray, you are not likely to feel much weariness, and all too soon you find yourself beyond its highest fountains. Climbing higher, new beauty comes streaming on the sight--autumn-painted meadows, late-blooming goldenrods, peaks of rare architecture, bright crystal lakes, and glimpses of the forested lowlands seen far in the west.
Over the divide the Mono Desert comes full into view, lying dreaming silent in thick purple light--a desert of heavy sun-glare, beheld from a foreground of ice-burnished granite. Here the mountain waters separate, flowing east to vanish in the volcanic sands and dry sky of the Great Basin, west to pass through the Golden Gate to the sea.
Passing a little way down over the summit until an elevation of about ten thousand feet is reached, you then push on southward dealing instinctively with every obstacle as it presents itself. Massive spurs, alternating with deep gorges and canyons, plunge abruptly from the shoulders of the snowy peaks and plant their feet in the warm desert. These are everywhere marked with characteristic sculptures of the ancient glaciers that swept over this entire region like one vast ice-wind, and the polished surfaces produced by the ponderous flood are still so perfectly preserved that in many places you will find them about as trying to the eyes as sheets of snow. But even on the barest of these ice pavements, in sheltered hollows countersunk beneath the general surface into which a few rods of well-ground moraine chips have been dumped, there are groves of spruce and pine thirty to forty feet high, trimmed around the edges with willow and huckleberry bushes; and sometimes still further with an outer ring of grasses bright with lupines, larkspurs, and showy columbines. All the streams, too, and the pools at this elevation, are furnished with little gardens, which, though making scarce any show at a distance, constitute charming surprises to the appreciative mountaineer in their midst. In these bits of leafiness a few birds find grateful homes, and having no acquaintance with man they fear no ill and flock curiously around the stranger, almost allowing themselves to be taken in hand. In so wild and so beautiful a region your first day will be spent, every sight and sound novel and inspiring, and leading you far from yourself. Wearied with enjoyment and the crossing of many canyons you will be glad to camp while yet far from Mount Ritter. With the approach of evening long, blue, spiky-edged shadows creep out over the snowfields, while a rosy glow, at first scarce discernible, gradually deepens, suffusing every peak and flushing the glaciers and the harsh crags above them. This is the alpenglow, the most impressive of all the terrestrial manifestations of God. At the touch of this divine light the mountains seem to kindle to a rapt religious consciousness, and stand hushed like worshippers waiting to be blessed. Then suddenly comes darkness and the stars.
On my first visit to Ritter I found a good campground on the rim of a glacier basin about 11,000 feet above the sea. A small lake nestles in the bottom of it, from which I got water for my tea, and a storm-beaten thicket nearby furnished abundance of firewood. Sombre peaks, hacked and shattered, circle half way round the horizon, wearing a most solemn aspect in the gloaming, and a waterfall chanted in deep base tones across the lake on its way down from the foot of a glacier. The fall and the lake and the glacier are almost equally bare, while the pines anchored in the fissures of the rocks are so dwarfed and shorn by storm-winds you may walk over the tops of them as if on a shaggy rug. The scene was one of the most desolate in tone I ever beheld. But the darkest scriptures of the mountains are illumined with bright passages of Nature's eternal love and they never fail to manifest themselves when one is alone. I made my bed in a nook of the pine thicket where the branches were pressed and crinkled overhead like a roof, and bent down on the sides. These are the best bed-chambers the Sierra affords, snug as squirrel-nests, well-ventilated, full of spicy odors, and with plenty of wind-played needles to sing one asleep. I little expected company in such a place, but creeping in through a low opening I found five or six small birds nestling among the tassels. The night wind begins to blow soon after dark, at first only a gentle breathing, but increasing toward midnight to a gale in strength, that fell on my leafy roof in rugged surges like a cascade, while the waterfall sang in chorus, filling the old ice-fountain with its solemn roar, and seeming to increase in power as the night advanced--fit voice for such a landscape. How glorious a greeting the sun gives the mountains! To behold this alone is worth the pains of any excursion a thousand times over. The highest peaks bum like islands in a sea of liquid shade. Then the lower peaks and spires catch the glow, and the long lances of light streaming through many a notch and pass, fall thick on the frosty meadows. The whole mountain world awakes. Frozen rills begin to flow. The marmots come out of their nests beneath the boulders and climb sunny rocks to bask. The lakes seen from every ridge-top shimmer with white spangles like the glossy needles of the low tasselled pines. The rocks, too, seem responsive to the vital sun-heat, rock-crystals and snow-crystals throbbing alike. Thrilled and exhilarated one strides onward in the crisp bracing air as if never more to feel fatigue, limbs moving without effort, every sense unfolding and alert like the thawing flowers to take part in the new day harmony.
All along your course thus far, excepting while crossing the canyons, the landscapes are open and expansive. On your left the purple plains of Mono repose dreamy and warm. On your right and in front, the near Alps spring keenly into the thin sky with more and more impressive sublimity.
But these larger views are at length lost. Rugged spurs and moraines and huge projecting buttresses begin to shut you in, until arriving at the summit of the dividing ridge between the head waters of Rush Creek and the northmost tributaries of the San Joaquin, a picture of pure wildness is disclosed, far surpassing every other you have yet seen.
