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- Herausgeber: DigiCat
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The Treasures of American Nature," John Muir eloquently captures the majestic landscapes and rich biodiversity of America, melding deep observational detail with impassioned prose that resonates with the spirit of the early conservation movement. Muir's writing transcends mere description; it is imbued with a philosophical grounding that reflects the interconnectedness of all living things and the profound beauty of the natural world. This work, composed in the late 19th century, encompasses themes of environmental stewardship and the transcendentalist influences that permeated Muir's early immersions in nature, making it a cornerstone of American nature writing and an essential text for understanding the nascent conservation ethos of the era. John Muir, often referred to as the 'Father of the National Parks,' was profoundly influenced by his own extensive explorations of the American wilderness. His experiences as a naturalist and a writer stem from a life dedicated to understanding and preserving the beauty of the natural world, navigating through vast landscapes from the Sierra Nevada to the coastal shores of California. Muir's scientific curiosity and spiritual connection to nature propelled him to advocate for its preservation, paving the way for the environmental movements that followed. Readers with an interest in environmentalism, nature writing, or American history will find "The Treasures of American Nature" to be an indispensable treasure in itself. Muir's lyrical descriptions and fervent advocacy inspire a deeper appreciation for the planet, urging one to engage with nature not just as a backdrop for human life, but as a vital participant in our shared existence. This book is a call to resonate with the wilderness within us all. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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The Treasures of American Nature
Table of Contents
Introduction
This collection, The Treasures of American Nature, gathers John Muir’s major books alongside seminal essays, travel narratives, and addresses to present a coherent portrait of his lifelong study and celebration of the North American wild. From the granite architecture of the Sierra Nevada to the icy coasts of Alaska and the arid chasms of the Colorado Plateau, these works chart an arc of observation, reflection, and advocacy. Bringing them together allows readers to trace how Muir’s field experiences, scientific inquiries, and literary craft informed one another, and how he forged a vocabulary that helped Americans recognize their landscapes as national, ethical, and aesthetic inheritances.
The scope includes full-length volumes such as The Mountains of California, Our National Parks, The Yosemite, Travels in Alaska, and the field-journal narrative My First Summer in the Sierra. It embraces travel and reportage in A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf and The Cruise of the Corwin, the compact moral adventure Stickeen: The Story of a Dog, and the editorial and descriptive enterprise Picturesque California, to which Muir contributed and for which he served in an editorial role. Complementing these are essays, studies, and addresses—among them Studies in Sierra, Save the Redwoods, and The National Parks and Forest Reservations—along with memorial portraits and region-specific sketches.
At the heart of Muir’s corpus stand the natural-history monographs The Mountains of California, Our National Parks, and The Yosemite. Each introduces readers to distinctive geologic forms, plant communities, and animal life, while explaining how processes such as glaciation, fire, and water shaped the land. Their initial premise is straightforward: to lead the attentive observer through mountain meadows, forests, and cliff-walled valleys. Yet their method fuses close, empirical attention with an exalted diction that makes phenomena intelligible and memorable. These books articulate a consistent claim—that American landscapes merit study, care, and public protection because they are both scientifically significant and artistically magnificent.
The travel narratives broaden the map of that argument. My First Summer in the Sierra stems from a herding season that unfolded into a revelatory apprenticeship in high-country natural history. A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf recounts an on-foot traverse from the Midwest toward the southeastern coast, recording botany, weather, and human encounters along the way. The Cruise of the Corwin follows a season aboard a government vessel in northern waters, while Travels in Alaska distills multiple journeys among fjords, forests, and glaciers. In each, the premise is similar: to walk or sail into unfamiliar country, observe keenly, and render experience into a record that enlarges knowledge and sympathy.
Stickeen: The Story of a Dog offers Muir’s most concentrated narrative of companionship and trial in the field. Set against an Alaskan icescape, it begins with an unlikely partnership between a small dog and a naturalist traveling among crevasses and storms. Without unveiling its climactic turn, the account uses a single episode to explore character, perception, and the quickened senses produced by shared risk. Its brevity and clarity showcase Muir’s ability to translate expedition hazards into a meditation on courage and trust, complementing the larger books by revealing how his philosophy of nature extends to the moral intelligence of fellow creatures.
Studies in Sierra and the cluster of Yosemite essays—Yosemite Glaciers, Yosemite in Winter, Yosemite in Spring, Features of the Proposed Yosemite National Park, The Treasures of the Yosemite, and A Rival of the Yosemite—assemble Muir’s most sustained inquiry into a single mountain province. Their premise is investigative: to examine how ice carved domes and valleys, how seasonal cycles animate the parklands, and how sister valleys compare in form and beauty. Presenting field measurements, observations, and reasoned argument, these pieces demonstrate his practice of testing ideas against rock, snow, and stream until landscape history becomes legible.
Advocacy enters explicitly in The National Parks and Forest Reservations and Save the Redwoods. These addresses and essays aim to persuade citizens and officials that public lands require permanent protection and wise administration. They outline reasons for reserving forests, safeguarding watersheds, and maintaining roadless sanctuaries. Features of the Proposed Yosemite National Park ties argument to mapping, describing boundaries and values to be included. Across these texts, Muir refines a rhetoric of stewardship that is civic as well as ecological, insisting that preservation serves science, recreation, and the moral education of a democratic people.
Steep Trails and Snow-Storm on Mount Shasta extend Muir’s topographic range and his fascination with weather. The former gathers excursions through mountains and deserts of the American West, while the latter offers a close, experiential account of ascending and surviving a high volcanic peak in severe conditions. Yosemite in Winter and Yosemite in Spring deepen the seasonal portrait of the valley, emphasizing how snowpack, floods, and blooms compose a year’s rhythm. The Grand Cañon of the Colorado situates canyon forms within this broader gallery of wonders, presenting the Colorado River’s masterpiece as a complementary chapter in the continental story.
The Hetch Hetchy Valley and A Rival of the Yosemite focus on a sister valley to Yosemite, advancing both aesthetic appreciation and practical concern. The premise is evaluative: to examine a glacial valley’s features—meadows, walls, waterfalls—and to argue for its parity with more famous scenery. These essays also anticipate the valley’s centrality in later public debates, underscoring that beauty and utility require careful reconciliation. By placing these assessments alongside broader park writings, the collection reveals how Muir linked particular places to general principles, making local topography a test case for national policy and public conscience.
Portraits of Edward Henry Harriman and Edward Taylor Parsons introduce a personal dimension to Muir’s public work. Framed as memorial appreciations, they sketch the character and contributions of a patron of exploration and a leader in organized conservation. Their inclusion demonstrates that Muir’s project relied on alliances—philanthropic support, club leadership, and scientific camaraderie—as much as solitary fieldwork. Stylistically, these pieces temper his usual landscape rapture with measured gratitude, showing how he narrated human lives with the same ethical focus he brought to forests and rivers, and how biography and advocacy intertwined within the conservation movement.
Across these works Muir’s hallmarks remain consistent. He unites meticulous field observation with a cadence that elevates description to celebration. He names plants and peaks with taxonomic care, yet also renders them as actors in a drama of ice and light. He explains processes—erosion, uplift, fire ecology—while conveying wonder without sentimentality. His prose tends toward clarity, repetition for emphasis, and metaphor drawn from music and architecture. Above all, he treats nature as community, where every creature and form participates in a larger order that merits attention, restraint, and joy. The result is a language equal to mountainous subjects.
The lasting significance of these writings lies in their practical and imaginative consequences. Practically, they helped build a case for national parks and forest reserves by educating readers, officials, and travelers. Imaginatively, they taught generations to see mountains, rivers, trees, and storms as teachers. By assembling books, journal narratives, studies, addresses, memorials, and regional sketches in one place, this collection invites readers to follow Muir’s path from observation to understanding to responsibility. The Treasures of American Nature thus presents not only a literary achievement but also a durable ethic: to know the land well enough to cherish and keep it.
Author Biography
John Muir (1838–1914) was a Scottish-born American naturalist, essayist, and influential advocate for wildlands whose writings helped shape the idea of national parks. Through books such as The Mountains of California, Our National Parks, My First Summer in the Sierra, The Yosemite, and Travels in Alaska, he united close observation with a lyrical, ethical plea for protecting mountains, forests, and glaciers. His narrative gifts are also evident in Stickeen: The Story of a Dog and in expeditionary accounts like The Cruise of the Corwin. Revered as a public thinker as well as a field observer, Muir bridged science, literature, and civic action.
Raised in rural America after emigrating from Scotland as a child, Muir combined farm labor with voracious reading and tinkering. He attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison, studying science informally before leaving to pursue practical work and long field rambles. An industrial accident and convalescence prompted a decisive turn toward a life outdoors, culminating in a long pedestrian journey south, later recounted in A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf. His education was self-directed and eclectic: botany and geology learned in meadows and workshops, and philosophical influences, notably American Transcendentalism, which sharpened his conviction that nature holds spiritual as well as scientific truths.
California’s Sierra Nevada became Muir’s proving ground. Working seasons in the high country, he kept notebooks on plants, meteorology, and landforms while ranging through Yosemite Valley and surrounding uplands. He advanced a then-controversial glacial origin for much of the region’s scenery, developing arguments in early essays such as Studies in Sierra and Yosemite Glaciers. Vivid episodes, including the harrowing Snow-Storm on Mount Shasta, conveyed both risk and rapture. Seasonal portraits like Yosemite in Winter and Yosemite in Spring paired empirical detail with a distinctive prose music. These pieces established Muir as a credible field naturalist and a persuasive public voice.
Muir’s mature California writing braided science, memory, and exhortation. The Mountains of California offered a panorama of elevations, waters, and forests; My First Summer in the Sierra turned field journals into an intimate apprenticeship in attention; and The Yosemite synthesized decades of observation into a landmark guide to the valley and its ice-carved neighborhood. As editor and contributor to Picturesque California, he helped present the state’s scenic richness to a broad audience. Essays like The Treasures of the Yosemite, A Rival of the Yosemite, and Features of the Proposed Yosemite National Park pressed aesthetic and geographic arguments for strong protection.
From writing sprang organizing. Muir helped found the Sierra Club and served as its early president, treating it as a citizens’ instrument for wilderness preservation. Our National Parks distilled his philosophy for the general public, while The National Parks and Forest Reservations argued that scenic and ecological values merited enduring safeguards. He engaged survey debates and boundary lines, applying field knowledge from the Sierra to the practical politics of park-making. Save the Redwoods extended his plea to coastal forests, articulating a broad conservation ethic. His counsel, writings, and public stature influenced legislators and executive leaders considering new reserves.
Muir’s range extended far beyond California. In Alaska he traced tidewater glaciers and botanical zones, later shaping the travelogue Travels in Alaska and the beloved adventure Stickeen: The Story of a Dog. The Cruise of the Corwin drew on a voyage into the Bering and Arctic seas, blending journal, natural history, and ethnographic glimpses. He interpreted Southwestern geomorphology in The Grand Cañon of the Colorado, bringing his glacial lens and literary resonance to desert stone. Memorial sketches such as Edward Henry Harriman and Edward Taylor Parsons testify to his ties within a wider conservation network of patrons, explorers, and organizers.
Muir’s final public battles centered on the Hetch Hetchy Valley, whose beauty he had celebrated in A Rival of the Yosemite and defended in The Hetch Hetchy Valley. Though the valley was ultimately dammed, the controversy clarified preservationist principles and broadened public commitment to parks. Muir continued to write and advise from the West Coast until his death in 1914. Several narratives appeared posthumously, including A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf, The Cruise of the Corwin, and Steep Trails. Today his books, especially The Yosemite and Our National Parks, remain touchstones for conservation, inspiring scientific curiosity joined to civic responsibility.
Historical Context
The Treasures of American Nature gathers John Muir’s most influential writings against the backdrop of the United States’ Gilded Age and Progressive Era, when industrialization, railroad expansion, and western settlement accelerated the transformation of landscapes. Between the 1860s and the 1910s, federal land policy, popular science, and tourism converged with intensifying timber, mining, and grazing. Muir’s books, essays, and addresses in this collection trace that convergence. They chronicle early environmental advocacy, the professionalization of geology and forestry, and the emergence of national parks. Read together, these works chart shifting American ideas about wilderness, beauty, and public responsibility, while documenting how scientific observation became a moral and political argument for preservation.
A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf records Muir’s 1867 trek through the Reconstruction South, later published posthumously in 1916. Traveling on foot from the Midwest to Florida, he moved through pine barrens, Appalachian foothills, and coastal swamps at a moment when former plantation regions were politically unsettled and ecologically stressed. His plant lists and notebook prose belong to a nineteenth‑century natural history tradition shaped by field collecting and taxonomy. The journey’s timing—just after the Civil War and before his western years—anchors the collection in a national context, linking Muir’s itinerant science with broader debates over the nation’s rebuilding and the meaning of its natural wealth.
My First Summer in the Sierra, published in 1911 from journals kept in 1869, depicts Muir’s first sustained season in California’s high country, when he worked as a shepherd and watched thousands of sheep graze the meadows. Written amid growing concern over overgrazing in the Sierra Nevada, its observations connect sensitivity to alpine botany with criticism of resource use, famously denouncing sheep as “hoofed locusts.” The book situates Muir within a regional economy dominated by timber and stockraising, while foreshadowing his later park advocacy. It also preserves a record of trans-Sierra movement before road building, when seasonal labor, pack trains, and trail networks shaped access to high terrain.
Studies in the Sierra (1870s) and related essays like Yosemite Glaciers intervened in a vigorous scientific controversy about Yosemite’s origin. Muir, writing in venues such as the Overland Monthly, argued that glaciers carved the valley—a view that clashed with leading figures of the California Geological Survey who favored catastrophic subsidence. His careful mapping of moraines, striations, and polished pavements helped popularize glacial theory in the American West. The debate exemplified a larger nineteenth‑century dynamic: independent field observers challenging established authority. It also linked western landscape interpretation to international science, aligning Yosemite with alpine research then unfolding in the European Alps and Scandinavia.
The Yosemite (1912) consolidates decades of observation, complementing earlier pieces such as Yosemite in Winter and Yosemite in Spring that catalog seasonal conditions with unusual precision. These texts span a policy transition begun with the 1864 Yosemite Grant to California and culminating in 1906, when the state returned Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove to federal control. Their detailed measurements, trail descriptions, and natural histories register the rise of tourism infrastructure—hotels, stage roads, and guides—while underscoring tensions between spectacle and stewardship. Together, they document how close description could serve as an administrative blueprint and a plea for restraint as visitation intensified.
In 1890, a coordinated magazine campaign helped transform advocacy into law. Century Magazine published The Treasures of the Yosemite and Features of the Proposed Yosemite National Park, pairing Muir’s prose with an editor’s reform strategy aimed at Congress. These pieces, alongside A Rival of the Yosemite, which promoted the Kings River region, advanced the case for new federal designations. That autumn, Congress created Sequoia National Park (September 1890), General Grant National Park (October 1890), and Yosemite National Park (October 1890), though Yosemite Valley remained under California until 1906. The articles illustrate how periodical culture, scenic rhetoric, and legislative timing converged to establish enduring public reserves.
The Mountains of California (1894), Snow-Storm on Mount Shasta (1877), and the later compilation Steep Trails (1918) showcase exploration tied to the West’s extractive boom. These works move through logging camps, mining districts, and volcanic summits, situating alpine ecologies beside sawmills and hydraulic claims. They record a geography newly accessible by wagon roads and rail spurs, where scientific curiosity coexisted with industrial pressures. Their mountaineering scenes and close botanical notes reflect a period when summits became laboratories and symbols, while their plains-to-peak itineraries map the gradient of environmental change from valley farms to glaciated headwalls.
Picturesque California (1888–1890), which Muir edited, belongs to the Gilded Age’s illustrated travel literature, where engravings and essays made scenery a cultural commodity. Issued by subscription and featuring artists and writers, the multivolume work aligns with the expanding market for images of the West. As transcontinental railroads (completed in 1869) and feeder lines grew, such pictorial volumes both fed and followed tourism, echoing guidebooks and gallery exhibitions. The emphasis on sublime and picturesque canons—granite domes, giant trees, cascades—helped fix a national iconography of nature that publishers, hotels, and readers shared, making aesthetics an ally of preservation.
Our National Parks (1901) captures a moment when the park idea was consolidating, just before Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency accelerated federal conservation. Muir used the book to inventory geologic forms, forest types, and wildlife, but also to outline park purposes. Two years later, Roosevelt camped with Muir in Yosemite (1903), a widely publicized trip that symbolized presidential endorsement of stronger protections. The Antiquities Act (1906) soon enabled presidents to proclaim national monuments, enlarging the toolkit for safeguarding landscapes. Muir’s text thus stands at the threshold of a policy shift, translating field science into a program for education, recreation, and restraint.
The National Parks and Forest Reservations reflects debates sharpened by the Forest Reserve Act (1891) and the 1897 Organic Act governing federal forests. Muir argued for strict preservation in parks and stricter regulation in forest reserves, decrying destructive grazing and logging. As professional forestry advanced under Gifford Pinchot and the U.S. Forest Service (created in 1905), utilitarian conservation—sustained yield and watershed protection—often clashed with Muir’s preservationist ethic. His address, circulated as a pamphlet in the mid‑1890s, illuminates the conceptual boundary between parks and forests, and shows how public meetings, club gatherings, and print could shape administrative doctrine for vast western domains.
The Hetch Hetchy Valley essays document Muir’s final and most controversial fight. After the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, advocates sought a secure municipal water supply within Yosemite National Park. Muir and the Sierra Club opposed damming Hetch Hetchy, arguing that a reservoir would destroy a sister valley to Yosemite. Despite a national debate, Congress passed the Raker Act (1913), authorizing the project. The defeat was bitter for Muir, who died in 1914, yet the controversy galvanized preservationists, influencing later advocacy for stronger protections and clearer limits on utility development within national parks.
Travels in Alaska (published posthumously in 1915) gathers accounts of Muir’s 1879–1880 voyages along the Alexander Archipelago and into Glacier Bay, undertaken soon after the 1867 U.S. purchase of Alaska. Guided by Tlingit experts and accompanied at times by missionary S. Hall Young, Muir mapped tidewater glaciers, cataloged flora, and described communities and customs he encountered. Stickeen: The Story of a Dog, first printed in 1897 and later issued as a small book in 1909, distills one dangerous glacier crossing into a moral fable of courage. Both works situate glaciology within intercultural travel, missionary networks, and the opening of Alaska to scientific and popular attention.
The Cruise of the Corwin, published in 1917, draws on Muir’s 1881 journals from a voyage aboard the U.S. Revenue Cutter Corwin into the Bering Sea and Arctic Ocean. The expedition, led by Captain Calvin L. Hooper, combined search-and-rescue aims with reconnaissance along Siberian and Alaskan coasts. Muir’s notes on sea ice, coastal geology, and tundra plants complement observations of Chukchi and other Indigenous communities. The narrative reflects an era when federal vessels advanced science alongside strategic interests, and when naturalists traveling on government ships helped translate remote regions into mapped, described, and thereby governable spaces in the American imagination.
The Grand Cañon of the Colorado engages a Southwest becoming newly accessible to travelers at the turn of the century. Railroads promoted excursions to northern Arizona, while scientists and surveyors transformed the canyon into a textbook of geology. Roosevelt proclaimed Grand Canyon National Monument in 1908 using the Antiquities Act; Congress established Grand Canyon National Park in 1919. Muir’s essay aligns interpretive language—stratigraphy, erosional time, desert botany—with national arguments for protection. It also shows how far the park idea had traveled by the 1900s, extending from the Sierra Nevada to the Colorado Plateau as federal authority over spectacular landscapes expanded.
Save the Redwoods, published posthumously in 1920, gathers Muir’s longstanding arguments for protecting California’s giant trees. He had celebrated giant sequoias in the 1890 creation of Sequoia and General Grant National Parks; the essay broadens the call to include coast redwoods, whose groves were rapidly being logged. In 1918, reformers founded the Save-the-Redwoods League, and state parks followed in the 1920s; decades later, Redwood National Park was established in 1968. The essay situates venerable trees within the era’s rhetoric of national patrimony, blending dendrology and patriotism to press for statutory measures and philanthropic purchase.
Two memorial sketches—Edward Henry Harriman and Edward Taylor Parsons—illuminate the alliances that enabled conservation. Harriman, a railroad executive, had sponsored the 1899 Harriman Alaska Expedition, which advanced coastal science and public interest in Alaska; Muir’s tribute acknowledges the role of private wealth and logistical capacity in exploration. Parsons, a key Sierra Club leader, backed campaigns including the Hetch Hetchy fight; after his death in 1914, his widow funded the Parsons Memorial Lodge in Tuolumne Meadows. These pieces reveal conservation as a networked enterprise, dependent on editors, donors, lawyers, and club volunteers as much as on field naturalists.
Across the collection, Muir fuses science, aesthetics, and moral suasion. He wrote in a culture shaped by Romanticism and by American Transcendentalism’s reverence for nature, yet he also embraced post‑Darwinian geology and botany. Works like Studies in the Sierra and The Mountains of California translate measurements and specimens into prose that could move readers and lawmakers. His metaphors—cathedrals of stone, temples of trees—helped sacralize public lands without abandoning empirical description. This hybrid rhetoric matched Progressive Era reform, which relied on both expert knowledge and public sentiment to secure institutional change in park management and forest law.
Synopsis (Selection)
Sierra Foundations (MY FIRST SUMMER IN THE SIERRA; THE MOUNTAINS OF CALIFORNIA; STUDIES IN SIERRA; SNOW-STORM ON MOUNT SHASTA)
These works immerse the reader in the Sierra Nevada as Muir balances close scientific observation with a soaring sense of kinship to mountains, forests, and meadows. He traces how glaciers, weather, and seasonal rhythms shape granite landscapes, using storm, snow, and bloom as evidence for geological and ecological insight. The tone is rapturous yet precise, with episodes of high-country peril serving as field laboratories for a developing conservation ethic.
The Yosemite Cycle (THE YOSEMITE; THE TREASURES OF THE YOSEMITE; YOSEMITE GLACIERS; YOSEMITE IN WINTER; YOSEMITE IN SPRING; FEATURES OF THE PROPOSED YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK; A RIVAL OF THE YOSEMITE; THE HETCH HETCHY VALLEY)
This cluster forms Muir’s most sustained portrait of Yosemite and kindred valleys across geology and season, from granite architecture and waterfalls to wildflower carpets and winter quiet. He explains glacial origins and compares rival splendors to underscore the case for protection, while proposing thoughtful park boundaries and stewardship. The voice blends lyrical celebration with policy-minded urgency, culminating in a vigorous defense of Hetch Hetchy as a twin treasure worthy of preservation.
National Parks Vision (OUR NATIONAL PARKS; THE NATIONAL PARKS AND FOREST RESERVATIONS; SAVE THE REDWOODS)
Here Muir scales up from single valleys to a national argument, portraying parks and forest reservations as scientific storehouses and public goods. He diagnoses threats, outlines management measures, and calls for enlarging protections, including safeguarding ancient redwood groves. The rhetoric is persuasive and forward-looking, marrying natural history with civic responsibility.
Alaska and the North Pacific (TRAVELS IN ALASKA; THE CRUISE OF THE CORWIN; STICKEEN: THE STORY OF A DOG)
These expeditionary narratives chart voyages among glaciers and rugged coasts, advancing Muir’s ice-born interpretation of landscapes while relishing the hazards and revelations of northern weather. A companion dog’s ordeal crystallizes the stark demands of the icefield into an intimate study of courage and trust, while an expedition account provides a wide-ranging natural history of remote shores. The mood is adventurous and contemplative, balancing risk with reverent observation.
Journeys Across America (A THOUSAND-MILE WALK TO THE GULF; STEEP TRAILS; THE GRAND CAÑON OF THE COLORADO)
From a long, botanical walk toward the Gulf to rugged western trail essays and a canyon meditation, these pieces map the breadth of American terrain and the human choices that shape it. Muir juxtaposes meticulous notes on plants, rocks, and aridity’s sculptural power with critiques of waste and praise for restraint. The tone is peripatetic and questioning, translating footpath discoveries into a broader ethic of national land care.
California Vistas Beyond the Sierra (PICTURESQUE CALIFORNIA)
This survey celebrates California’s scenic richness, setting mountains alongside coasts, valleys, and other landmarks in vivid, accessible sketches. It complements the Sierra narratives by situating beauty within a statewide mosaic and inviting readers to see landscape as both art and living system. The mood is pictorial and invitational, designed to kindle admiration that ripens into stewardship.
Profiles and Commemorations (EDWARD HENRY HARRIMAN; EDWARD TAYLOR PARSONS)
These portraits commemorate conservation allies, tracing character, resolve, and public service as forces that move preservation from ideal to institution. Muir links individual example to collective outcomes, showing how leadership sustains parks, forests, and organizations dedicated to the commons. The tone is respectful and exhortative, using remembrance to encourage ongoing civic guardianship.
The Treasures of American Nature
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.
There, immediately in front, looms the majestic mass of Mt. Ritter, with a glacier swooping down its face nearly to your feet, then curving, westward and pouring its frozen flood into a blue-green lake whose shores are bound with precipices of crystalline snow, while a deep chasm drawn between the divide and the glacier separates the sublime picture from everything else. Only the one huge mountain in sight, the one glacier, and one lake; the whole veiled with one blue shadow--rock, ice, and water, without a single leaf. After gazing spell-bound you begin instinctively to scrutinize every notch and gorge and weathered buttress of the mountain with reference to making the ascent. The entire front above the glacier appears as one tremendous precipice, slightly receding at the top and bristling with comparatively short spires and pinnacles set above one another in formidable array. Massive lichen-stained battlements stand forward, here and there hacked at the top with angular notches and separated by frosty gullies and recesses that have been veiled in shadow ever since their creation, while to right and left, far as the eye can reach, are huge crumbling buttresses offering no invitation to the climber. The head of the glacier sends up a few fingerlike branches through couloirs, but these are too steep and short to be available, and numerous narrow-throated gullies down which stones and snow are avalanched seem hopelessly steep, besides being interrupted by vertical cliffs past which no side way is visible. The whole is rendered still more terribly forbidding by the chill shadow, and the gloomy blackness of the rocks, and the dead silence relieved only by the murmur of small rills among the crevasses of the glacier, and ever and anon the rattling report of falling stones. Nevertheless the mountain may be climbed from this side, but only tried mountaineers should think of making the attempt.
