1,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
The Complete Works of John Muir is an expansive anthology that encompasses the writings of one of America's foremost naturalists and environmentalists. Muir's prose is characterized by its lyrical beauty, vividly painting the landscapes of the American wilderness while seamlessly interweaving the themes of spirituality and conservationism. His essays, letters, and books, a blend of scientific observation and poetic reflection, provide readers with a comprehensive vision of nature's beauty and fragility, illustrating the profound interconnection between humanity and the natural world. Muir's works resonate within the context of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a period marked by increasing industrialization and a burgeoning conservation movement in the United States. John Muir, often referred to as the 'Father of the National Parks,' was a Scottish-American naturalist whose passion for the environment was molded by his early experiences in nature. His commitment to preserving the wilderness was further solidified by his explorations of Yosemite and other American landscapes. Muir's influence extends beyond literature; he played a critical role in the establishment of national parks, shaping environmental policy and public sentiment towards conservation. This anthology is highly recommended for anyone with a deep appreciation for nature, literature, or environmental advocacy. Muir's eloquent writing invites readers on a transformative journey, urging them to recognize their role in protecting the natural world. Engaging with The Complete Works of John Muir is not only an opportunity to explore the author's rich reflections on nature but also a call to action to preserve the beauty that surrounds us. 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.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
Ähnliche
The Complete Works of John Muir
Table of Contents
Introduction
This collection presents the full compass of John Muir’s published legacy, gathering his major books, articles, and speeches alongside his autobiography, selected letters, and a contemporary tribute. It is designed to let readers follow a single, unmistakable voice across settings: the solitude of a high-country camp, the measured argument of a public forum, and the candor of private correspondence. More than a bookshelf of separate volumes, it is an integrated portrait of a writer-naturalist whose observations, narratives, and appeals belonged to the same lifelong project: exploring, describing, and defending the wild landscapes that shaped his thought and broadened public understanding.
Spanning expeditions on foot and by ship, alpine seasons and coastal storms, these works trace Muir’s movement from close field notebooks to polished narratives and persuasive addresses. The reader encounters early Sierra studies, extended accounts of Yosemite and the California ranges, a long southern walk to the Gulf of Mexico, voyages and investigations in Alaska, and essays that respond to particular places and crises. Set amid the period’s magazines and platforms but collected here as a continuous record, the writings show how experience in the field informed his public interventions, and how public responsibilities sent him back to the field.
Multiple literary forms stand side by side. There are book-length natural histories and travel narratives, compact essays and reports, speeches written for civic occasions, a sustained memoir of childhood and youth, and letters that reveal process and relationship. A brief, celebrated animal narrative sits alongside a shipboard journal. Field studies of the Sierra Nevada share space with an illustrated survey of Western scenery. The result is not a miscellany but a coherent body of work whose variety mirrors its subjects, allowing readers to see how descriptive attention, scientific curiosity, and ethical argument take different shapes while serving a common aim.
The books gathered here range from intimate seasonal immersion to panoramic surveys. Explorations of the California mountains and national parks distill years of walking, climbing, and observing. The Yosemite writings bring a single valley and its watershed into high relief, while accounts of Alaska extend the inquiry to tidewater, forest, and ice. A thousand-mile pedestrian journey to the Gulf provides a contrasting traverse of lowlands and coasts. A compact tale of a dog on a storm-bound glacier tests character against weather and ice. Shipboard and trail narratives round out a corpus that balances immediacy with retrospective synthesis.
The articles and speeches crystallize the advocacy that made Muir a public figure. Here are appeals for national parks and forest reservations, arguments to protect living redwood groves, and defenses of valleys and canyons threatened by development. Seasonal sketches of Yosemite and studies of its glaciers combine interpretation with urgency, inviting readers to see first and then to care. Pieces focused on Mount Shasta and the Grand Canyon widen the arch of attention beyond the Sierra. Together these writings show how he translated field evidence into civic language, aligning observation, moral claim, and policy aim without sacrificing wonder.
Complementing the published books and articles, the autobiographical account of early years and the collected letters add texture and proportion. The memoir traces the formation of a naturalist’s habits of attention and work, setting later travels against the backdrop of youth. The letters bring his voice into closer range—inquiring, practical, reflective—documenting relationships and the steady labor behind manuscripts, expeditions, and campaigns. Read alongside the public essays, they illuminate continuity of purpose as well as shifts in emphasis, revealing how personal experience, friendship, and editorial exchange shaped the pages that reached a wide audience.
The inclusion of a tribute by Samuel Hall Young offers a companion vantage. Written by a colleague who knew Muir in the Alaska years, it situates the explorer and writer within shared journeys and conversations, adding eyewitness detail to the portrait that emerges from Muir’s own pages. The perspective is invaluable not because it replaces the author’s voice, but because it corroborates and complicates it, underscoring habits in the field, modes of engagement with people and places, and the temper that readers infer from his narratives. In concert, the two voices enlarge the record of experience and character.
Certain themes bind the whole. A conviction that wild nature possesses its own integrity and agency runs through the books and essays. Geological time and process—especially glaciation—provide a framework for reading mountains and valleys, while weather and seasons impart a living rhythm. The works hold that careful seeing is a moral practice: attention becomes respect; respect becomes responsibility. The same passages that revel in light, granite, ice, and trees also ask what kind of human community can stand as a worthy neighbor to such places, and what tradeoffs are unacceptable when beauty and function are at stake.
Stylistically, Muir writes at the confluence of science and art. He pairs observational exactness with figurative reach, building images from verifiable detail and extending them toward feeling and meaning. Personification and analogy enliven processes that might otherwise seem remote, while precise vocabulary aims to honor the thing seen. The cadence of his sentences varies with terrain—brisk in travel, meditative in camp, forthright in advocacy—yet remains accessible across audiences. Even in polemical moments he favors explanation over invective, trusting that clarity, proportion, and a sense of delight can persuade where scolding cannot.
The significance of these works is literary, scientific, and civic. They document places before and during transformative pressures, preserve observations of flora, fauna, and ice, and model a way of writing that welcomes general readers into serious natural history. Just as importantly, the corpus demonstrates how narrative and essay can mobilize public imagination on behalf of shared goods. By interpreting specific mountains, forests, and rivers with care, Muir helped broaden support for protecting them, contributing to the early momentum of national parks and forest reservations. The texts remain instructive for how knowledge, feeling, and policy can be brought into alignment.
Readers will notice how attention widens and narrows across regions. The Sierra Nevada and Yosemite serve as a crucible for methods later applied to Mount Shasta, the Grand Canyon, and the coastal and glacial systems of Alaska. A long southern walk and varied Western trails introduce lowland rivers, swamps, deserts, and seashores. Weather is not backdrop but participant: storms, snowfields, winds, and thawing creeks alter plans and perceptions. This geographical and meteorological range allows the collection to test its themes against diverse conditions, showing that the same habits of attention can honor both granite domes and tidewater ice.
Approached as a whole, the collection invites several paths. One may read chronologically to watch methods mature, regionally to follow a single landscape in depth, or generically to compare the effect of narrative, essay, speech, and letter. However arranged, the result is a sustained encounter with a writer whose careful looking becomes a form of care. For general readers, students, and scholars alike, the gathered works offer a durable resource: a record of places, a record of mind, and a prompt to consider how language can both delight and defend. The pages ask to be read outdoors as well as in.
Author Biography
John Muir (1838–1914) was a Scottish-born American naturalist, essayist, and preservation advocate whose books and public campaigns helped shape the United States conservation movement. Writing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he combined close observation of mountains, forests, and glaciers with a lyrical, devotional prose that made wilderness legible and compelling to general readers. His fieldwork and essays on the Sierra Nevada, Yosemite Valley, and Alaska introduced many to the idea that wild landscapes possess intrinsic value beyond utilitarian use. Muir’s influence reached from magazine audiences to presidents and legislators, and his name became synonymous with national parks, the Sierra Club, and a preservation ethic that argued for setting aside large tracts of land in perpetuity.
He grew up in Scotland and, after emigrating in the 1840s, on a Wisconsin farm where rigorous labor and Bible reading shaped his habits of attention and language. Fascinated by mechanics and plants, he devised labor-saving inventions before pursuing irregular studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in the early 1860s. Though he did not take a degree, coursework in botany and geology, and the guidance of mentors who encouraged his notebooks and field collecting, proved decisive. Through essays and conversations he encountered Emersonian Transcendentalism and a tradition of natural theology that saw divinity reflected in nature’s order. Those currents, filtered through firsthand observation, formed the moral and stylistic framework of his later writing.
A turning point came in the late 1860s when an industrial accident temporarily blinded him, prompting a resolve to devote his life to studying wild places. After recovering, he set out on a long pedestrian journey from the Midwest to the Gulf of Mexico, keeping a journal of plants and impressions later published as A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf. Seeking a healthier climate, he continued west to California and reached the Sierra Nevada, where Yosemite’s granite walls and alpine meadows became his laboratory and sanctuary. Working seasonal jobs and living simply, he ranged widely through high country, refining a self-directed education in botany, meteorology, and especially glacial geomorphology.
Muir’s earliest publications appeared in regional periodicals before national magazines carried his accounts of the Sierra and his arguments that glaciers had scoured and shaped Yosemite Valley. In contested exchanges with established geologists, he marshaled field evidence—moraines, polished pavements, active ice—to support a glacial origin. His books extended this blend of science and reverence: The Mountains of California surveyed Sierra geology and ecology; Our National Parks gathered essays that doubled as a policy brief; My First Summer in the Sierra drew from his 1869 field notebooks; The Yosemite synthesized decades of observation; and Stickeen distilled a perilous Alaskan excursion into a parable of character. Posthumous volumes, including Travels in Alaska and A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf, broadened his reach.
Alaska became Muir’s second great province. Beginning in the late 1870s he made repeated voyages along the Inside Passage, traveled by canoe among fjords and islands, and documented spectacular tidewater glaciers; the prominent Muir Glacier bears his name. He returned in the 1890s, including as a member of the widely publicized Harriman Alaska Expedition, sharpening public awareness of northern landscapes then little known to readers in the contiguous states. Earlier, in Yosemite, he had met Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose visit affirmed affinities between Transcendentalist ideals and Muir’s own practice of attentive walking, sketching, and journaling. Across regions, his prose sought to reconcile scientific clarity with an ethic of joyful, humble belonging in wild nature.
By the late 1880s Muir turned increasingly to advocacy. In collaboration with editors and allies, he used national magazines to argue for federal protection of forests and mountain watersheds. Campaigns helped lead to the establishment of Yosemite and Sequoia as national parks in 1890, and in 1892 he helped found the Sierra Club, serving as its first president and using the organization to mobilize citizen support for preservation. His 1903 camping trip with President Theodore Roosevelt in Yosemite dramatized the cause and translated aesthetics into policy. The protracted fight over Hetch Hetchy Valley, which Congress ultimately opened to a reservoir in 1913, marked a bitter defeat, yet it educated a generation in the values and vocabulary of wilderness protection.
Muir spent his later years writing, organizing, and revisiting beloved ranges while assembling manuscripts from decades of journals. He died in California in 1914, leaving a body of work that continues to orient nature writing, conservation policy, and outdoor ethics. Celebrated as a "father of the national parks," he is read today both for his exuberant descriptions and for arguments that landscapes deserve protection for their own sake. Contemporary scholarship also reexamines his era’s assumptions, including early characterizations of Indigenous peoples and the erasure of Native stewardship in park narratives. Within that evolving context, Muir’s insistence on wonder, scientific attentiveness, and civic action remains a touchstone for environmental thought and movements worldwide.
Historical Context
John Muir’s collected writings arise from a half century when the United States remade its landscapes and its ideals. Born in Dunbar, Scotland, in 1838 and emigrating to Wisconsin in 1849, Muir came of age as the Civil War ended and the West was opened by the 1869 transcontinental railroad. His books, essays, speeches, and letters—from accounts of the Sierra Nevada and Alaska to advocacy for national parks—reflect the shift from extraction to preservation that marked the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Appearing in magazines and volumes between the 1870s and the 1910s, they shaped a public philosophy of wild nature as a national inheritance.
Muir’s early formation joined Scottish moral rigor with American scientific curiosity. On a frontier farm near Portage, Wisconsin, he built clocks and plant presses before attending the University of Wisconsin (1860–1863), where botany and geology, nurtured by mentorship from Jeanne C. Carr, redirected his mechanical talents toward field science. His letters—later gathered in collections, including those written to the Indianapolis educator Catharine Merrill—record how nineteenth‑century networks of professors, editors, and patrons introduced a self‑taught naturalist to the nation’s intellectual circles. That scholarly correspondence later undergirded his popular books and policy arguments, fusing observation, literature, and reform into a single public voice.
A factory eye injury in Indianapolis in March 1867 propelled Muir from workshops to wildlands. His convalescent resolve produced the thousand‑mile walk south through Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, and Florida (1867–1868), a Reconstruction‑era journey later published from his journals. He crossed war‑scarred terrains, visited cedar swamps near Cedar Key, and planned to continue to South America before changing course to California via Panama in March 1868. This pivot placed him at the center of debates over Western resources, Indigenous dispossession, and the meanings of a continental commons, themes that echo across his later accounts of the Sierra, the Grand Canyon, and the far North.
Arriving in San Francisco in 1868, Muir soon entered the Sierra Nevada. His 1869 sheep‑herding season in the Tuolumne country became a foundational journal of close observation. In the early 1870s he lived for stretches in Yosemite Valley, built a cabin along Yosemite Creek, and launched empirical studies of glaciation that challenged the California Geological Survey under Josiah Dwight Whitney. Encouraged by editors and allies, he published a sequence of essays—later known as “Studies in the Sierra”—that described moraines, polished pavements, and living ice. Encounters with visitors such as Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1871 strengthened the merger of scientific argument and a distinctly American nature spirituality.
Muir’s prose was shaped by nineteenth‑century aesthetics of the sublime and picturesque promoted by painters and photographers. Carleton Watkins’s mammoth‑plate images of Yosemite and Albert Bierstadt’s panoramic canvases formed a visual culture into which Muir wrote. Magazines such as Scribner’s and The Century surrounded his essays with engravings that taught readers to see grandeur in cliffs, glaciers, and trees. The multivolume Picturesque California (issued 1888–1890), to which he contributed text, epitomized this fusion of art and advocacy. As tourism expanded with new roads and rail lines, such images and descriptions converted remote valleys and giant sequoia groves into icons of a common national heritage.
Muir’s career coincided with the invention of national parks as a federal idea. The Yosemite Grant of 1864 set aside the valley and Mariposa Grove for California; in 1872, Yellowstone became the first national park. In 1890, Congress created Yosemite National Park around the state grant, along with Sequoia and General Grant National Parks. Muir’s articles in The Century and other venues helped frame the case for these acts. After long controversy, the Yosemite Valley returned to federal control in 1906. His books on the Sierra and parks synthesized decades of field experience at a moment when the nation was defining public lands at scale.
Policy debates during Muir’s lifetime set preservation against utilitarian conservation. The Forest Reserve Act of 1891 authorized presidents to withdraw timberlands, and the Organic Administration Act of 1897 regulated their use. Gifford Pinchot’s scientific forestry under President Theodore Roosevelt emphasized sustained yield and multiple use; Muir argued for strict preservation of certain sacred places. Roosevelt’s 1903 camping trip with Muir in Yosemite symbolized the alliance, and tension, between these approaches. The Antiquities Act of 1906 empowered executive protection of natural features as monuments, while Muir’s speeches and essays pressed for national parks and forest reservations grounded in aesthetic, scientific, and moral claims.
Industrial expansion sharpened every conservation question Muir engaged. Sierra forests fed mines and railroads; hydraulic mining scarred river systems; sheep—Muir’s “hoofed locusts”—denuded alpine meadows. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake intensified demands for municipal water, culminating in the bid to dam Hetch Hetchy, a Yosemite high‑country valley Muir praised as a peer to the famous floor. The Raker Act of 1913 authorized the project, despite nationwide protest; Muir died in Los Angeles on December 24, 1914, with the outcome unresolved for preservationists. His writings on redwoods, Sierra meadows, and the Tuolumne watershed became touchstones in later campaigns to save old‑growth forests and free rivers.
Alaska offered Muir a living laboratory for ice, succession, and coastal cultures. Following the 1867 U.S. purchase, he traveled north in 1879 and 1880 to Glacier Bay and the Stikine region, where he studied tidewater glaciers and learned from Tlingit guides and Presbyterian missionary S. Hall Young. The small dog Stickeen, owned by Young, figured in a perilous 1880 glacier crossing that Muir later immortalized. In 1881 he sailed aboard the U.S. Revenue Cutter Corwin to the Bering Sea and Arctic, visiting St. Lawrence Island and Wrangel Land during rescue and patrol missions. A 1899 voyage with Edward H. Harriman added scientific rigor and celebrity to his Alaskan narratives.
Geology provided Muir with both method and controversy. Embracing Louis Agassiz’s glacial theory and Charles Lyell’s uniformitarianism, he mapped Sierra moraines, striae, and erratics to argue that Yosemite valleys were sculpted by ice, not solely by catastrophic subsidence. His accounts of Mount Shasta storms and fumaroles, of living Sierra and Alaskan glaciers, and of desert canyons aligned with broader surveys led by Clarence King and John Wesley Powell. Writing later on the Grand Canyon, he joined a chorus of explorers translating Western geomorphology for lay readers. Across these works, empirical measurement and lyrical description worked together to democratize specialized scientific knowledge.
Muir’s influence depended on the late‑nineteenth‑century print revolution. The Overland Monthly in San Francisco introduced him regionally in the 1870s; national audiences found him in Harper’s, The Atlantic, Scribner’s, and The Century. Editors such as Robert Underwood Johnson cultivated him as a public intellectual, pairing his essays with engravings and maps. Railroad distribution networks expanded readership from Boston to St. Louis and San Francisco. The Sierra Club Bulletin, founded after 1892, published his speeches and technical articles for a growing constituency of hikers and voters. Through this ecosystem of periodicals and books, popular sentiment translated into petitions, congressional bills, and presidential proclamations.
Organizational politics anchored Muir’s later activism. He helped found the Sierra Club in San Francisco on May 28, 1892, serving for years as president alongside colleagues including William Colby, Joseph N. LeConte, and Edward Taylor Parsons. The Club pressed for Yosemite boundary protections, mountaineering access, and a coherent park system, while publishing research and photographs. It also navigated new federal bureaucracies, from the General Land Office to the U.S. Forest Service (created in 1905 under the Department of Agriculture). Eulogies Muir wrote for allies like Parsons, and for patrons such as railroad magnate E. H. Harriman, show the interdependence of philanthropy, science, and reform.
Transportation and tourism both threatened and preserved the places Muir loved. Stage roads via Coulterville and Big Oak Flat, and hotels at Wawona and Glacier Point, seeded a tourist economy in Yosemite by the 1870s. The Yosemite Valley Railroad reached El Portal in 1907, while Southern Pacific and Union Pacific lines under figures like Collis P. Huntington and E. H. Harriman linked parks to cities. Galen Clark, guardian of the Mariposa Grove, mediated visitor experience. Muir navigated these currents, arguing for access that did not industrialize sublime scenery. His descriptions guided travel while pressing for limits on grazing, timber cutting, and dam construction along those same corridors.
Muir’s language braided science with an American religious imagination. A Presbyterian upbringing, tempered by Emersonian transcendentalism, produced a vocabulary of sacred mountains and divine glaciers that appealed to urban readers seeking moral clarity in industrial times. Yet his writings were also shaped by settler colonial histories: the 1851 Mariposa Battalion’s removal of the Ahwahneechee from Yosemite, and ongoing marginalization of Native peoples he encountered in California and Alaska. While he sometimes reflected prevailing prejudices, his later accounts acknowledged Indigenous skill and knowledge on ice and trail. These tensions contextualize his letters, tributes, and park advocacy within broader debates about belonging and stewardship.
Field practice gave Muir credibility beyond rhetoric. He traveled lightly with an alpenstock, aneroid barometer, and notebook, bivouacked on ledges, and crossed crevasses on snow bridges. His Mount Shasta ascents in the 1870s, winter forays to high Sierra passes, and tidewater glacier trips in 1879–1881 blended risk with disciplined observation—timed meltwater pulses, temperature logs, and plant succession notes from freshly deglaciated ground. Sketch maps and pressed specimens flowed to correspondents and editors. This empirical backbone lent authority to later syntheses of mountain ecology, park management, and the seasons in Yosemite, persuading readers that lyrical beauty and scientific exactness could coexist in one argument.
Publication consolidated Muir’s life work just as institutions matured. The Mountains of California (1894) distilled his Sierra studies; Our National Parks (1901) surveyed a system in formation; My First Summer in the Sierra (1911) and The Yosemite (1912) returned to formative places; his autobiography, The Story of My Boyhood and Youth (1913), set character within frontier labor and learning. Posthumous volumes from journals and reports—on Alaska, the Corwin cruise, his Southern walk, and Western trails—appeared between 1915 and 1918. After his death in 1914, the National Park Service was established in 1916 under Stephen T. Mather and Horace M. Albright, institutionalizing many goals he had articulated.
Muir’s oeuvre belongs to a wider national transformation. With the 1890 Census declaring the frontier closed and Frederick Jackson Turner theorizing its significance in 1893, Americans sought new identity in protected landscapes. Progressive‑Era reforms redirected corporate power toward public purposes; the 1906 Antiquities Act and later state redwood parks, spurred by advocacy and writings later collected under titles like Save the Redwoods, extended those protections. Tributes by contemporaries, including S. Hall Young’s Alaska Days with John Muir (1915), fixed his legend in memory. From Sierra granite to Arctic ice and Gulf Coast swamps, his pages remain coordinates for science‑based, justice‑minded conservation.
Synopsis (Selection)
PICTURESQUE CALIFORNIA
An illustrated survey of California and the American West that blends scenic description with natural history, showcasing Yosemite, the redwoods, coastlines, and desert vistas for a general audience.
THE MOUNTAINS OF CALIFORNIA
Essays on the Sierra Nevada’s geology, glaciers, forests, and wildlife, combining firsthand climbs and field notes with the case for glaciation’s role in shaping the range and for its preservation.
OUR NATIONAL PARKS
A tour of early American parks that describes their landscapes and ecology while arguing for stronger federal protection, better management, and expansion of the national park system.
MY FIRST SUMMER IN THE SIERRA
A diary of Muir’s 1869 season herding sheep in the Sierra, recording daily encounters with meadows, storms, and wildlife that crystallize his scientific and spiritual view of wild nature.
THE YOSEMITE
A comprehensive account of Yosemite Valley and the surrounding high country—its geology, waterfalls, forests, weather, and trails—serving as both guide and natural history.
TRAVELS IN ALASKA
Narratives from three Alaskan journeys centered on Glacier Bay and the coast, detailing glacier dynamics, coastal forests, and encounters with Indigenous communities and explorers.
STICKEEN: THE STORY OF A DOG
A taut true adventure of crossing dangerous glacial crevasses in Alaska with a small dog, highlighting courage, companionship, and the testing power of wilderness.
THE CRUISE OF THE CORWIN
A log of the 1881 Arctic voyage aboard the revenue cutter Corwin, blending search-and-rescue efforts with observations of sea ice, wildlife, and northern peoples.
A THOUSAND-MILE WALK TO THE GULF
An 1867 botanical trek from the Midwest to Florida, recounting Southern landscapes and swamps, plant collecting, and reflections on ecology and society.
STEEP TRAILS
A posthumous miscellany of western travel and nature essays spanning the Great Basin, Pacific Northwest, and Alaska, portraying deserts, volcanoes, forests, and canyons.
STUDIES IN SIERRA
Early analytical papers presenting evidence for extensive glaciation in the Sierra Nevada and the glacial origin of Yosemite Valley, grounded in field measurements and observation.
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 cluster of essays that depict Yosemite’s seasons and geologic forces, inventory its scenic and scientific riches, propose and defend a larger national park, and argue against damming Hetch Hetchy as equal in value to Yosemite Valley.
Conservation Addresses (THE NATIONAL PARKS AND FOREST RESERVATIONS; SAVE THE REDWOODS)
Public appeals for expanding and safeguarding federal parks and forest reserves, condemning destructive logging and grazing, and calling specifically for permanent protection of California’s coast redwoods.
Landmark Landscape Essays (SNOW-STORM ON MOUNT SHASTA; THE GRAND CAÑON OF THE COLORADO)
Vivid field narratives that render extreme mountain weather and volcanism on Mount Shasta, and interpret the Grand Canyon’s vast erosional architecture, colors, and scale for general readers.
Commemorative Sketches (EDWARD HENRY HARRIMAN; EDWARD TAYLOR PARSONS)
Memorial portraits of key conservation allies, noting their characters and their support for exploration, the Sierra Club, and preservation campaigns such as the fight over Hetch Hetchy.
THE STORY OF MY BOYHOOD AND YOUTH
A memoir of Muir’s Scottish childhood and Wisconsin frontier years, depicting strict family life, early inventions, and the awakening curiosity that led to his life in nature.
LETTERS TO A FRIEND
Personal correspondence—largely to Jeanne Carr—chronicling fieldwork, travels, and evolving conservation ideas, offering an intimate counterpoint to Muir’s published books.
ALASKA DAYS WITH JOHN MUIR by Samuel Hall Young
A companion’s reminiscences of traveling with Muir in Alaska, recounting shared expeditions, encounters with Tlingit communities, and episodes like the Stickeen adventure to portray Muir’s character in action.
The Complete Works of John Muir
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.
