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- Herausgeber: Vertebrate Digital
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
'When a man plants a tree, he plants himself. Every root is an anchor, over which he rests with grateful interest, and becomes sufficiently calm to feel the joy of living.' Steep Trails encompasses a delightful mix of John Muir's essays and adventure narratives, spanning a period of twenty-nine years. The selections included in this book are varied: ranging from geological studies to stories of the people and towns he encounters throughout his exploits. As Muir expert Terry Gifford observes in the foreword, 'Most of Steep Trails' chapters are dispatches from Muir as travelling correspondent with a mixture of insights into local cultures, criticism of pollution and enthusiasm for everything wild.' Muir's refreshing philosophy of being 'at one' with nature shines through every account he details, as does his agenda for environmental activism – to treat wildness lovingly, rather than selfishly for material greed. Covering mostly the western regions of the states, California, Washington, Nevada, The Grand Canyon, Oregon and Utah; Steep Trails showcases Muir's passion continuously as he climbs mountains, bathes in lakes, and sketches his findings. Muir's classic extended metaphors and knowledgeable tone are present throughout, making for both an enjoyable and educational read. The enthusiasm contained within these pages is infectious, and as well as simply describing the beauty he sees, Muir will inspire you too, to 'go and see for yourselves' the rewards of studying the endless gift of nature: 'Surely faithful and loving skill can go no farther in putting the multitudinous decorated forms on paper. But the colours, the living, rejoicing colours, chanting morning and evening in chorus to heaven! Whose brush or pencil, however lovingly inspired, can give us these? And if paint is of no effect, what hope lies in pen-work? Only this: some may be incited by it to go and see for themselves.'
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Steep Trails
John Muir
www.v-publishing.co.uk
Contents
Series introduction by Terry Gifford
We have never needed nature more than now. At a time when our relationship with our home planet is under stress, the positive words of John Muir (1838–1914) can help us to reconnect, retune, and readjust what it is that we should value for the survival of our species. In 1901 John Muir opened his book Our National Parks with words that might resonate for readers today: ‘Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilised people are beginning to find that going to the mountains is going home’. This Scot, transplanted to the USA at the age of eleven by his family to help carve a farm out of the wilds of Wisconsin, came to invent the modern notion of a national park for the ‘recreation’ of future generations. His initial inspiration was Yosemite Valley, deep in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California, where he was sought out by the US President, Theodore Roosevelt, who was persuaded on a characteristic Muir camping trip that such an uplifting place and its rich ecology should be preserved in perpetuity for the nation.
Anticipating the modern concept of ‘biophilia’ – our need for regular contact between our inner nature with the outer nature around us – Muir’s opening sentence continued with the idea ‘that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life’. Muir’s suggestion that the fountains of our own lives need to be in contact with the self-renewing cycles of life in wild landscapes led him to be recognised as the founder of the American conservation movement. His establishment of the Sierra Club – still to this day a vigorous local and national conservation organisation in the US – arose because Muir understood the importance of local people holding government to account through membership of a national environmental movement. Muir knew that national policies would be needed if the balance between the economic ‘usefulness’ of timber and rivers was to be controlled. By the end of Our National Parks Muir’s tone had changed. ‘Any fool can destroy trees’, he declared in full preaching mode. ‘God has cared for these trees … but he cannot save them from fools – only Uncle Sam can do that’.
Actually, it was Muir’s ecological knowledge, gained by close observation, by scientific experiment and by always reflecting upon the larger forces at work in nature, that resulted in insights ahead of their time, like the idea that unregulated clear cutting of timber reduced the usefulness of those irrigating rivers as ‘fountains of life’. At a time just before the notion of ‘Oekology’ was being proposed, Muir wrote that, ‘When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe’. And it is in such unassuming, seductively approachable prose that Muir explored his vision of nature and our relationship with it. It was as a popular writer of newspaper and journal articles that Muir gained his following as a writer. Late in life he began crafting these little lyrical discoveries into the inspirational books that speak so clearly to our heightened environmental awareness today.
Foreword by Terry Gifford
When John Muir died on Christmas Eve 1914, his two daughters asked William Badè to become Muir’s literary executor and four years later he produced Steep Trails from newspaper articles and letters. This inspired collection contains some of Muir’s most profound thoughts and experiences. The opening essay ‘Wild Wool’, written in 1875, has been described by Michael Cohen as ‘probably the best ecological argument of his career’. Distilling what he had learned from Darwin, Muir criticises the human manipulation of nature in the face of the evidence of the long process of natural selection for the quality and resilience of wild species of animals, wool and fruits. The wild Sierra mountain sheep produce better wool than domesticated sheep, the implication being, Michael Cohen suggests, that ‘humans would have to return to nature if they wished to continue their own evolution’. The world was not made, Muir says, ‘especially for the uses of man’. Recognising the chains of predation at work in the wild, Muir inserts his characteristic qualification based, as usual, on his observations that wild creatures are ‘eating and being eaten, in harmonious proportions and quantities’. We have to remember that Muir was writing at a time when ‘ecology’ had barely been invented and what we now mean by ‘sustainability’ was not the same thing as the American nineteenth century idea of ‘wise use’ in which the element of ‘wisdom’ was based upon short-term economic benefit.
On the other hand, Steep Trails captures some of Muir’s most telling experiences. It includes the only confession by Muir of having fallen in the mountains. ‘A Geologist’s Winter Walk’ describes ‘ascending a precipitous rock-front, smoothed by glacial action, when I suddenly fell – for the first time since I touched foot to Sierra rocks. After several somersaults, I became insensible from the shock’. Coming to consciousness on the edge of a vertical drop into Tenaya Canyon Muir spoke to his feet, newly returned from the city: ‘that is what you get by intercourse with stupid town stairs and dead pavements’. Undeterred, Muir, to regain his harmony with the Sierra’s smooth granite, sought out ‘the most nerve-trying places I could find … confident that the last of the town fog had been shaken from both head and feet’. Muir slept out on ‘a naked boulder’ and then undertook ‘another day of sketching and noting, and any form of climbing’. It was all in a day’s work for Muir, but he had been humbled and was now newly attuned. Recently, Doug Scott wrote to me about Muir’s ability to bivvy out with complete confidence in being at home in his mountain environment. Reflecting upon his own familiarity with snow-holing that led to his digging in for the night with Dougal Haston below the summit of Everest, Doug commented on my criticism of Muir for rare lapses of attention that he regarded Muir as completely ‘blameless’. Steep Trails offers readers a chance to make their own judgement, reading through Muir’s holistic rhetoric of ‘harmony’ to the actual remarkable experiences that he survived.
One such week-long snow-bound bivvy is described in A Perilous Night on Shasta’s Summit. Muir knew how to make himself safe and comfortable in a snow hole. But that essay concludes with a more serious night out in a snow storm beside a hot spring, ‘frozen and burned’, in which Muir admits that he was lucky to escape serious frostbite to his feet. He thawed them ‘very slowly by keeping them buried in soft snow for several hours, which avoided permanent damage’. Muir’s intimate knowledge of the still less-travelled Shasta region is informed by his learning from the Native Americans and the white hunters he meets, making a frugal living in the wilderness: ‘rare men, “queer characters”, and well worth knowing’. Better lives are lived in the mountains, he reflects, than ‘in crowded towns mildewed and dwarfed in disease and crime!’ This leads Muir to his famous argument for the essential restorative effect of mountaineering: ‘the mountains are fountains, not only of rivers and fertile soil, but of men. Therefore we are all, in some sense, mountaineers, and going to the mountains is going home. Yet how many are doomed to toil in town shadows while the white mountains beckon all along the horizon!’
Most of Steep Trails’ chapters are dispatches from Muir as travelling correspondent with a mixture of insights into local cultures, criticism of pollution and enthusiasm for everything wild. In Salt Lake City he castigates the apparent misogyny of Mormon men. In the Tabernacle he hears a church elder give thanks for ‘fruitful fields, horses, cows, wives and implements’. But after a swim in the Great Salt Lake he finds the Mormons he meets ‘rich in human kindness’ as though the two things were linked. In Nevada’s forests Muir pays great attention to the Native American practice of harvesting pine nuts: ‘The Indians alone appreciate this portion of nature’s bounty and celebrate the harvest home with dancing and feasting’. There is a wonderful account of a journey from San Francisco up the coast of Oregon to the Olympic Peninsula and Puget Sound. There is a particularly vivid account of a climb of Mount Rainier by a new route from the south in which the party were lucky to lose only an alpenstock. Muir’s celebratory style infects even the most scientific accounts such as The Physical and Climatic Characteristics of Oregon: ‘The fogs occur mostly in the fall and spring. They are grand, far-reaching affairs of two kinds, the black and the white, some of the latter being very beautiful, and the infinite delicacy of their touch as they linger to caress the tall evergreens is most exquisite.’
Badè was clever in keeping until the last chapter what Muir himself admitted to be ‘untellable from descriptions or pictures, however good’. But Muir rises to the challenge of the Grand Canyon, first by noticing that stunned silence is the most appropriate response, then by bursting into ecstatic Muirisms (‘Wildness so godful, cosmic, primeval, bestows a new sense of earth’s beauty and size’), then by taking the reader with him into the experience of the trails, storms, geology and flora. His last sentence sums up not just this canyon, or this book, but the effect of all Muir’s writings upon his readers: ‘And as we go on and on, studying this old, old life in the light of the life beating warmly about us, we enrich and lengthen our own’.
– CHAPTER 1 –
Wild Wool
Moral improvers have calls to preach. I have a friend who has a call to plough, and woe to the daisy sod or azalea thicket that falls under the savage redemption of his keen steel shares. Not content with the so-called subjugation of every terrestrial bog, rock and moorland, he would fain discover some method of reclamation applicable to the ocean and the sky, that in due calendar time they might be brought to bud and blossom as the rose. Our efforts are of no avail when we seek to turn his attention to wild roses, or to the fact that both ocean and sky are already about as rosy as possible – the one with stars, the other with dulse and foam, and wild light. The practical developments of his culture are orchards and clover fields wearing a smiling, benevolent aspect, truly excellent in their way, though a near view discloses something barbarous in them all. Wildness charms not my friend, charm it never so wisely: and whatsoever may be the character of his heaven, his earth seems only a chaos of agricultural possibilities calling for grubbing-hoes and manures.
Sometimes I venture to approach him with a plea for wildness, when he good-naturedly shakes a big mellow apple in my face, reiterating his favourite aphorism, ‘Culture is an orchard apple; nature is a crab’. Not all culture, however, is equally destructive and unappreciative. Azure skies and crystal waters find loving recognition, and few there be who would welcome the axe among mountain pines, or would care to apply any correction to the tones and costumes of mountain waterfalls. Nevertheless, the barbarous notion is almost universally entertained by civilised man, that there is in all the manufactures of nature something essentially coarse which can and must be eradicated by human culture. I was, therefore, delighted in finding that the wild wool growing upon mountain sheep in the neighbourhood of Mount Shasta was much finer than the average grades of cultivated wool. This fine discovery was made some three months ago,1 while hunting among the Shasta sheep between Shasta and Lower Klamath Lake. Three fleeces were obtained – one that belonged to a large ram about four years old, another to a ewe about the same age, and another to a yearling lamb. After parting their beautiful wool on the side and many places along the back, shoulders and hips, and examining it closely with my lens, I shouted, ‘Well done for wildness! Wild wool is finer than tame!’
My companions stooped down and examined the fleeces for themselves, pulling out tufts and ringlets, spinning them between their fingers, and measuring the length of the staple, each in turn paying tribute to wildness. It was finer, and no mistake; finer than Spanish Merino. Wild wool is finer than tame.
‘Here’, said I, ‘is an argument for fine wildness that needs no explanation. Not that such arguments are by any means rare, for all wildness is finer than tameness, but because fine wool is appreciable by everybody alike – from the most speculative president of national wool-growers’ associations, all the way down to the gude-wife spinning by her ingle-side’.
Nature is a good mother, and sees well to the clothing of her many bairns – birds with smoothly imbricated feathers, beetles with shining jackets and bears with shaggy furs. In the tropical south, where the sun warms like a fire, they are allowed to go thinly clad; but in the snowy northland she takes care to clothe warmly. The squirrel has socks and mittens and a tail broad enough for a blanket; the grouse is densely feathered down to the ends of his toes; and the wild sheep, besides his undergarment of fine wool, has a thick overcoat of hair that sheds off both the snow and the rain. Other provisions and adaptations in the dresses of animals, relating less to climate than to the more mechanical circumstances of life, are made with the same consummate skill that characterises all the love-work of nature. Land, water and air, jagged rocks, muddy ground, sand-beds, forests, underbrush, grassy plains, etc., are considered in all their possible combinations while the clothing of her beautiful wildlings is preparing. No matter what the circumstances of their lives may be, she never allows them to go dirty or ragged. The mole, living always in the dark and in the dirt, is yet as clean as the otter or the wave-washed seal; and our wild sheep, wading in snow, roaming through bushes, and leaping among jagged storm-beaten cliffs, wears a dress so exquisitely adapted to its mountain life that it is always found as unruffled and stainless as a bird.
On leaving the Shasta hunting grounds I selected a few specimen tufts, and brought them away with a view to making more leisurely examinations; but, owing to the imperfectness of the instruments at my command, the results thus far obtained must be regarded only as rough approximations.
As already stated, the clothing of our wild sheep is composed of fine wool and coarse hair. The hairs are from about two to four inches long, mostly of a dull bluish-grey colour, though varying somewhat with the seasons. In general characteristics they are closely related to the hairs of the deer and antelope, being light, spongy and elastic, with a highly polished surface, and though somewhat ridged and spiraled, like wool, they do not manifest the slightest tendency to felt or become taggy. A hair two and a half inches long, which is perhaps near the average length, will stretch about one fourth of an inch before breaking. The diameter decreases rapidly both at the top and bottom, but is maintained throughout the greater portion of the length with a fair degree of regularity. The slender tapering point in which the hairs terminate is nearly black: but, owing to its fineness as compared with the main trunk, the quantity of blackness is not sufficient to affect greatly the general colour. The number of hairs growing upon a square inch is about 10,000; the number of wool fibres is about 25,000, or two and a half times that of the hairs. The wool fibres are white and glossy, and beautifully spired into ringlets. The average length of the staple is about an inch and a half. A fibre of this length, when growing undisturbed down among the hairs, measures about an inch; hence the degree of curliness may easily be inferred. I regret exceedingly that my instruments do not enable me to measure the diameter of the fibres, in order that their degrees of fineness might be definitely compared with each other and with the finest of the domestic breeds; but that the three wild fleeces under consideration are considerably finer than the average grades of Merino shipped from San Francisco is, I think, unquestionable.
When the fleece is parted and looked into with a good lens, the skin appears of a beautiful pale-yellow colour, and the delicate wool fibres are seen growing up among the strong hairs, like grass among stalks of corn, every individual fibre being protected about as specially and effectively as if enclosed in a separate husk. Wild wool is too fine to stand by itself, the fibres being about as frail and invisible as the floating threads of spiders, while the hairs against which they lean stand erect like hazel wands; but, notwithstanding their great dissimilarity in size and appearance, the wool and hair are forms of the same thing, modified in just that way and to just that degree that renders them most perfectly subservient to the well-being of the sheep. Furthermore, it will be observed that these wild modifications are entirely distinct from those which are brought chancingly into existence through the accidents and caprices of culture; the former being inventions of God for the attainment of definite ends. Like the modifications of limbs – the fin for swimming, the wing for flying, the foot for walking – so the fine wool for warmth, the hair for additional warmth and to protect the wool, and both together for a fabric to wear well in mountain roughness and wash well in mountain storms.
The effects of human culture upon wild wool are analogous to those produced upon wild roses. In the one case there is an abnormal development of petals at the expense of the stamens, in the other an abnormal development of wool at the expense of the hair. Garden roses frequently exhibit stamens in which the transmutation to petals may be observed in various stages of accomplishment, and analogously the fleeces of tame sheep occasionally contain a few wild hairs that are undergoing transmutation to wool. Even wild wool presents here and there a fibre that appears to be in a state of change. In the course of my examinations of the wild fleeces mentioned above, three fibres were found that were wool at one end and hair at the other. This, however, does not necessarily imply imperfection, or any process of change similar to that caused by human culture. Water lilies contain parts variously developed into stamens at one end, petals at the other, as the constant and normal condition. These half wool, half hair fibres may therefore subserve some fixed requirement essential to the perfection of the whole, or they may simply be the fine boundary lines where an exact balance between the wool and the hair is attained.
I have been offering samples of mountain wool to my friends, demanding in return that the fineness of wildness be fairly recognised and confessed, but the returns are deplorably tame. The first question asked is, ‘Now truly, wild sheep, wild sheep, have you any wool?’ while they peer curiously down among the hairs through lenses and spectacles. ‘Yes, wild sheep, you have wool; but Mary’s lamb had more. In the name of use, how many wild sheep, think you, would be required to furnish wool sufficient for a pair of socks?’ I endeavour to point out the irrelevancy of the latter question, arguing that wild wool was not made for man but for sheep, and that, however deficient as clothing for other animals, it is just the thing for the brave mountain-dweller that wears it. Plain, however, as all this appears, the quantity question rises again and again in all its commonplace tameness. For in my experience it seems well-nigh impossible to obtain a hearing on behalf of nature from any other standpoint than that of human use. Domestic flocks yield more flannel per sheep than the wild, therefore it is claimed that culture has improved upon wildness; and so it has as far as flannel is concerned, but all to the contrary as far as a sheep’s dress is concerned. If every wild sheep inhabiting the Sierra were to put on tame wool, probably only a few would survive the dangers of a single season. With their fine limbs muffled and buried beneath a tangle of hairless wool, they would become short-winded, and fall an easy prey to the strong mountain wolves. In descending precipices they would be thrown out of balance and killed, by their taggy wool catching upon sharp points of rocks. Disease would also be brought on by the dirt which always finds a lodgement in tame wool, and by the draggled and water-soaked condition into which it falls during stormy weather.
No dogma taught by the present civilisation seems to form so insuperable an obstacle in the way of a right understanding of the relations which culture sustains to wildness as that which regards the world as made especially for the uses of man. Every animal, plant and crystal controverts it in the plainest terms. Yet it is taught from century to century as something ever new and precious, and in the resulting darkness the enormous conceit is allowed to go unchallenged.
I have never yet happened upon a trace of evidence that seemed to show that any one animal was ever made for another as much as it was made for itself. Not that nature manifests any such thing as selfish isolation. In the making of every animal the presence of every other animal has been recognised. Indeed, every atom in creation may be said to be acquainted with and married to every other, but with universal union there is a division sufficient in degree for the purposes of the most intense individuality; no matter, therefore, what may be the note which any creature forms in the song of existence, it is made first for itself, then more and more remotely for all the world and worlds.
Were it not for the exercise of individualising cares on the part of nature, the universe would be felted together like a fleece of tame wool. But we are governed more than we know, and most when we are wildest. Plants, animals and stars are all kept in place, bridled along appointed ways, with one another, and through the midst of one another – killing and being killed, eating and being eaten, in harmonious proportions and quantities. And it is right that we should thus reciprocally make use of one another, rob, cook and consume, to the utmost of our healthy abilities and desires. Stars attract one another as they are able, and harmony results. Wild lambs eat as many wild flowers as they can find or desire, and men and wolves eat the lambs to just the same extent.
This consumption of one another in its various modifications is a kind of culture varying with the degree of directness with which it is carried out, but we should be careful not to ascribe to such culture any improving qualities upon those on whom it is brought to bear. The water ouzel plucks moss from the riverbank to build its nest, but it does not improve the moss by plucking it. We pluck feathers from birds, and less directly wool from wild sheep, for the manufacture of clothing and cradle-nests, without improving the wool for the sheep, or the feathers for the bird that wore them. When a hawk pounces upon a linnet and proceeds to pull out its feathers, preparatory to making a meal, the hawk may be said to be cultivating the linnet, and he certainly does effect an improvement as far as hawk-food is concerned; but what of the songster? He ceases to be a linnet as soon as he is snatched from the woodland choir; and when, hawk-like, we snatch the wild sheep from its native rock, and, instead of eating and wearing it at once, carry it home, and breed the hair out of its wool and the bones out of its body, it ceases to be a sheep.
These breeding and plucking processes are similarly improving as regards the secondary uses aimed at; and, although the one requires but a few minutes for its accomplishment, the other many years or centuries, they are essentially alike. We eat wild oysters alive with great directness, waiting for no cultivation, and leaving scarce a second of distance between the shell and the lip; but we take wild sheep home and subject them to the many extended processes of husbandry, and finish by boiling them in a pot – a process which completes all sheep improvements as far as man is concerned. It will be seen, therefore, that wild wool and tame wool – wild sheep and tame sheep – are terms not properly comparable, nor are they in any correct sense to be considered as bearing any antagonism toward each other; they are different things, planned and accomplished for wholly different purposes.
Illustrative examples bearing upon this interesting subject may be multiplied indefinitely, for they abound everywhere in the plant and animal kingdoms wherever culture has reached. Recurring for a moment to apples. The beauty and completeness of a wild apple tree living its own life in the woods is heartily acknowledged by all those who have been so happy as to form its acquaintance. The fine wild piquancy of its fruit is unrivalled, but in the great question of quantity as human food wild apples are found wanting. Man, therefore, takes the tree from the woods, manures and prunes and grafts, plans and guesses, adds a little of this and that, selects and rejects, until apples of every conceivable size and softness are produced, like nut-galls in response to the irritating punctures of insects. Orchard apples are to me the most eloquent words that culture has ever spoken, but they reflect no imperfection upon nature’s spicy crab. Every cultivated apple is a crab, not improved, but cooked, variously softened and swelled out in the process, mellowed, sweetened, spiced and rendered pulpy and foodful, but as utterly unfit for the uses of nature as a meadowlark killed and plucked and roasted. Give to nature every cultured apple – codling, pippin, russet – and every sheep so laboriously compounded – muffled South Downs, hairy Cotswolds, wrinkled Merinos – and she would throw the one to her caterpillars, the other to her wolves.
It is now some 3,600 years since Jacob kissed his mother and set out across the plains of Padanaram to begin his experiments upon the flocks of his uncle, Laban; and, notwithstanding the high degree of excellence he attained as a wool-grower, and the innumerable painstaking efforts subsequently made by individuals and associations in all kinds of pastures and climates, we still seem to be as far from definite and satisfactory results as we ever were. In one breed the wool is apt to whither and crinkle like hay on a sun-beaten hillside. In another, it is lodged and matted together like the lush tangled grass of a manured meadow. In one the staple is deficient in length, in another in fineness; while in all there is a constant tendency toward disease, rendering various washings and dippings indispensable to prevent its falling out. The problem of the quality and quantity of the carcass seems to be as doubtful and as far removed from a satisfactory solution as that of the wool. Desirable breeds blundered upon by long series of groping experiments are often found to be unstable and subject to disease – bots, foot-rot, blind-staggers, etc. – causing infinite trouble, both among breeders and manufacturers. Would it not be well, therefore, for someone to go back as far as possible and take a fresh start?
The source or sources whence the various breeds were derived is not positively known, but there can be hardly any doubt of their being descendants of the four or five wild species so generally distributed throughout the mountainous portions of the globe, the marked differences between the wild and domestic species being readily accounted for by the known variability of the animal, and by the long series of painstaking selection to which all its characteristics have been subjected. No other animal seems to yield so submissively to the manipulations of culture. Jacob controlled the colour of his flocks merely by causing them to stare at objects of the desired hue; and possibly Merinos may have caught their wrinkles from the perplexed brows of their breeders. The California species (Ovis montana2) is a noble animal, weighing when full-grown some 350 pounds, and is well worthy of the attention of wool-growers as a point from which to make a new departure, for pure wildness is the one great want, both of men and of sheep.
1 This essay was written early in 1875. [Editor] [Back]
2 The wild sheep of California are now classified as Ovis nelsoni. Whether those of the Shasta region belonged to the latter species, or to the bighorn species of Oregon, Idaho and Washington, is still an unsettled question. [Editor] [Back]
– CHAPTER 2 –
A Geologist’s Winter Walk3
After reaching Turlock, I sped afoot over the stubble fields and through miles of brown hemizonia and purple erigeron, to Hopeton, conscious of little more than that the town was behind and beneath me, and the mountains above and before me; on through the oaks and chaparral of the foothills to Coulterville; and then ascended the first great mountain step upon which grows the sugar pine. Here I slackened pace, for I drank the spicy, resiny wind, and beneath the arms of this noble tree I felt that I was safely home. Never did pine trees seem so dear. How sweet was their breath and their song and how grandly they winnowed the sky! I tingled my fingers among their tassels, and rustled my feet among their brown needles and burrs, and was exhilarated and joyful beyond all I can write.
When I reached Yosemite, all the rocks seemed talkative, and more telling and lovable than ever. They are dear friends, and seemed to have warm blood gushing through their granite flesh; and I love them with a love intensified by long and close companionship. After I had bathed in the bright river, sauntered over the meadows, conversed with the domes, and played with the pines, I still felt blurred and weary, as if tainted in some way with the sky of your streets. I determined, therefore, to run out for a while to say my prayers in the higher mountain temples. ‘The days are sunfull, I said, ‘and, though now winter, no great danger need be encountered, and no sudden storm will block my return, if I am watchful’.
The morning after this decision, I started up the canyon of Tenaya, caring little about the quantity of bread I carried; for, I thought, a fast and a storm and a difficult canyon were just the medicine I needed. When I passed Mirror Lake, I scarcely noticed it, for I was absorbed in the great Tissiack – her crown a mile away in the hushed azure; her purple granite drapery flowing in soft and graceful folds down to my feet, embroidered gloriously around with deep, shadowy forest. I have gazed on Tissiack a thousand times – in days of solemn storms, and when her form shone divine with the jewellery of winter, or was veiled in living clouds; and I have heard her voice of winds, and snowy, tuneful waters when floods were falling; yet never did her soul reveal itself more impressively than now. I hung about her skirts, lingering timidly, until the higher mountains and glaciers compelled me to push up the canyon.
This canyon is accessible only to mountaineers, and I was anxious to carry my barometer and clinometer through it, to obtain sections and altitudes, so I chose it as the most attractive highway. After I had passed the tall groves that stretch a mile above Mirror Lake, and scrambled around the Tenaya Fall, which is just at the head of the lake groves, I crept through the dense and spiny chaparral that plushes the roots of the mountains here for miles in warm green, and was ascending a precipitous rock-front, smoothed by glacial action, when I suddenly fell – for the first time since I touched foot to Sierra rocks. After several somersaults, I became insensible from the shock, and when consciousness returned I found myself wedged among short, stiff bushes, trembling as if cold, but not injured in the slightest.
Judging by the sun, I could not have been insensible very long; probably not a minute, possibly an hour; and I could not remember what made me fall, or where I had fallen from; but I saw that if I had rolled a little farther, my mountain-climbing would have been finished, for just beyond the bushes the canyon wall steepened and I might have fallen to the bottom. ‘There’, said I, addressing my feet, to whose separate skill I had learned to trust night and day on any mountain, ‘that is what you get by intercourse with stupid town stairs, and dead pavements’. I felt degraded and worthless. I had not yet reached the most difficult portion of the canyon, but I determined to guide my humbled body over the most nerve-trying places I could find; for I was now awake, and felt confident that the last of the town fog had been shaken from both head and feet.
I camped at the mouth of a narrow gorge which is cut into the bottom of the main canyon, determined to take earnest exercise next day. No plushy boughs did my ill-behaved bones enjoy that night, nor did my bumped head get a spicy cedar plume pillow mixed with flowers. I slept on a naked boulder, and when I awoke all my nervous trembling was gone.
The gorged portion of the canyon, in which I spent all the next day, is about a mile and a half in length; and I passed the time in tracing the action of the forces that determined this peculiar bottom gorge, which is an abrupt, ragged-walled, narrow-throated canyon, formed in the bottom of the wide-mouthed, smooth and bevelled main canyon. I will not stop now to tell you more; some day you may see it, like a shadowy line, from Clouds’ Rest. In high water, the stream occupies all the bottom of the gorge, surging and chafing in glorious power from wall to wall. But the sound of the grinding was low as I entered the gorge, scarcely hoping to be able to pass through its entire length. By cool efforts, along glassy, ice-worn slopes, I reached the upper end in a little over a day, but was compelled to pass the second night in the gorge, and in the moonlight I wrote you this short pencil-letter in my notebook:
The moon is looking down into the canyon, and how marvellously the great rocks kindle to her light! Every dome, and brow, and swelling boss touched by her white rays, glows as if lighted with snow. I am now only a mile from last night’s camp; and have been climbing and sketching all day in this difficult but instructive gorge. It is formed in the bottom of the main canyon, among the roots of Clouds’ Rest. It begins at the filled-up lake-basin where I camped last night, and ends a few hundred yards above, in another basin of the same kind. The walls everywhere are craggy and vertical, and in some places they overlean. It is only from twenty to sixty feet wide, and not, though black and broken enough, the thin, crooked mouth of some mysterious abyss; but it was eroded, for in many places I saw its solid, seamless floor.
I am sitting on a big stone, against which the stream divides, and goes brawling by its rapids on both sides; half of my rock is white in the light, half in shadow. As I look from the opening jaws of this shadowy gorge, South Dome is immediately in front – high in the stars, her face turned from the moon, with the rest of her body gloriously muffled in waved folds of granite. On the left, sculptured from the main Cloud’s Rest ridge, are three magnificent rocks, sisters of the great South Dome. On the right is the massive, moonlit front of Mount Watkins, and between, low down on the farthest distance, is Sentinel Dome, girdled and darkened with forest. In the near foreground Tenaya Creek is singing against boulders that are white with snow and moonbeams. Now look back twenty yards, and you will see a waterfall fair as a spirit; the moonlight just touches it, bringing it into relief against a dark background of shadow. A little to the left, and a dozen steps this side of the fall, a flickering light marks my camp – and a precious camp it is. A huge, glacier-polished slab, falling from the smooth, glossy flank of Cloud’s Rest, happened to settle on edge against the wall of the gorge. I did not know that this slab was glacier-polished until I lighted my fire. Judge of my delight. I think it was sent here by an earthquake. It is about twelve feet square. I wish I could take it home4 for a hearthstone. Beneath this slab is the only place in this torrent-swept gorge where I could find sand sufficient for a bed.
I expected to sleep on the boulders, for I spent most of the afternoon on the slippery wall of the canyon, endeavouring to get around this difficult part of the gorge, and was compelled to hasten down here for water before dark. I shall sleep soundly on this sand; half of it is mica. Here, wonderful to behold, are a few green stems of prickly rubus, and a tiny grass. They are here to meet us. Ay, even here in this darksome gorge, ‘frightened and tormented’ with raging torrents and choking avalanches of snow. Can it be? As if rubus and the grass leaf were not enough of God’s tender prattle words of love, which we so much need in these mighty temples of power, yonder in the ‘benmost bore’ are two blessed adiantums. Listen to them! How wholly infused with God is this one big word of love that we call the world! Goodnight. Do you see the fire-glow on my ice-smoothed slab, and on my two ferns and the rubus and grass panicles? And do you hear how sweet a sleep-song the fall and cascades are singing?
The water-ground chips and knots that I found fastened between the rocks kept my fire alive all through the night. The next morning I rose nerved and ready for another day of sketching and noting, and any form of climbing. I escaped from the gorge about noon, after accomplishing some of the most delicate feats of mountaineering I ever attempted; and here the canyon is all broadly open again – the floor luxuriantly forested with pine, and spruce, and silver fir, and brown-trunked librocedrus. The walls rise in Yosemite forms, and Tenaya Creek comes down 700 feet in a white brush of foam. This is a little Yosemite Valley: it is about 2,000 feet above the level of the main Yosemite, and about 2,400 below Lake Tenaya.
I found the lake frozen, and the ice was so clear and unruffled that the surrounding mountains and the groves that look down upon it were reflected almost as perfectly as I ever beheld them in the calm evening mirrors of summer. At a little distance, it was difficult to believe the lake frozen at all; and when I walked out on it, cautiously stamping at short intervals to test the strength of the ice, I seemed to walk mysteriously, without adequate faith, on the surface of the water. The ice was so transparent that I could see through it the beautifully wave-rippled, sandy bottom, and the scales of mica glinting back the down-pouring light. When I knelt down with my face close to the ice, through which the sunbeams were pouring, I was delighted to discover myriads of Tyndall’s six-rayed water flowers, magnificently coloured.
A grand old mountain mansion is this Tenaya region! In the glacier period it was a mer de glace, far grander than the mer de glace of Switzerland, which is only about half a mile broad. The Tenaya mer de glace was not less than two-miles broad, late in the glacier epoch, when all the principal dividing crests were bare; and its depth was not less than 1,500 feet. Ice streams from Mounts Lyell and Dana, and all the mountains between, and from the nearer Cathedral Peak, flowed hither, welded into one, and worked together. After eroding this Tenaya Lake basin, and all the splendidly sculptured rocks and mountains that surround and adorn it, and the great Tenaya Canyon, with its wealth of all that makes mountains sublime, they were welded with the vast South, Lyell and Illilouette glaciers on one side, and with those of Hoffman on the other – thus forming a portion of a yet grander mer de glace in Yosemite Valley.
I reached the Tenaya Canyon, on my way home, by coming in from the northeast, rambling down over the shoulders of Mount Watkins, touching bottom a mile above Mirror Lake. From thence home was but a saunter in the moonlight.
After resting one day, and the weather continuing calm, I ran up over the left shoulder of South Dome and down in front of its grand split face to make some measurements, completed my work, climbed to the right shoulder, struck off along the ridge for Cloud’s Rest, and reached the topmost heave of her sunny wave in ample time to see the sunset.
Cloud’s Rest is 1,000 feet higher than Tissiack. It is a wavelike crest upon a ridge, which begins at Yosemite with Tissiack, and runs continuously eastward to the thicket of peaks and crests around Lake Tenaya. This lofty granite wall is bent this way and that by the restless and weariless action of glaciers just as if it had been made of dough. But the grand circumference of mountains and forests are coming from far and near, densing into one close assemblage; for the sun, their god and father, with love ineffable, is glowing a sunset farewell. Not one of all the assembled rocks or trees seemed remote. How impressively their faces shone with responsive love!
I ran home in the moonlight with firm strides; for the sun-love made me strong. Down through the junipers; down through the firs; now in jet shadows, now in white light; over sandy moraines and bare, clanking rocks; past the huge ghost of South Dome rising weird through the firs; past the glorious fall of Nevada, the groves of Illilouette; through the pines of the valley; beneath the bright crystal sky blazing with stars. All of this mountain wealth in one day! One of the rich ripe days that enlarge one’s life; so much of the sun upon one side of it, so much of the moon and stars on the other.
3 An excerpt from a letter to a friend, written in 1872. [Editor.] [Back]
4 Muir at this time was making Yosemite Valley his home. [Editor] [Back]
