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- Herausgeber: DigiCat
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The Wilderness Essays," John Muir eloquently articulates his profound reverence for nature, weaving personal experience with philosophical reflection. This collection of essays, written in the late 19th century, encapsulates Muir's passionate advocacy for the preservation of the American wilderness, employing a lyrical and descriptive prose style that vividly captures the beauty and intricacies of the natural world. Muir's writing is not only a reflection of the Romantic literary tradition but also acts as a significant precursor to the environmental movement, offering readers a lens through which to appreciate both the aesthetic and intrinsic value of unspoiled landscapes. John Muir, often referred to as the "Father of the National Parks," was a Scottish-American naturalist whose childhood and early adulthood were steeped in the wonder of the natural world. His experiences in the Sierra Nevada and other wild regions shaped his convictions about conservation and the urgent need to safeguard nature against industrialization. Muir's travels and observations inspired him to become a vocal advocate for establishing national parks, which informs the essays' call to action. "The Wilderness Essays" is an essential read for anyone interested in environmental literature, nature writing, or the historical context of conservation efforts in America. Muir's insights resonate deeply today, urging readers to reconnect with the wilderness and consider their role in its ongoing preservation. 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: 2023
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The Wilderness Essays
Table of Contents
Introduction
The Wilderness Essays gathers, in one continuous compass, John Muir’s most influential wilderness writings: full-length books, travel narratives, scientific papers, and public addresses alongside shorter essays and commemorative pieces. The purpose of this collection is to present the sweep of Muir’s thought as it developed across places and decades, while preserving the individuality of each work. Readers will find exploratory journeys, close natural history studies, and persuasive advocacy for public lands. Bringing these works together emphasizes how Muir’s observational science, lyrical prose, and civic engagement interlock, allowing the whole arc of his life in letters to be read as one sustained argument for wild nature.
The volumes and pieces assembled here span several literary forms. There are book-length studies such as The Mountains of California, The Yosemite, Our National Parks, and Travels in Alaska; memoir and journal-based narratives including My First Summer in the Sierra and A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf; expedition reportage in The Cruise of the Corwin; an animal narrative in Stickeen: The Story of a Dog; and numerous essays, addresses, and tributes. Selections such as Studies in Sierra, Yosemite Glaciers, and The National Parks and Forest Reservations show his scientific and policy writing, while memorial sketches like Edward Henry Harriman and Edward Taylor Parsons reveal his public relationships.
The California works introduce Muir’s central terrain and method. The Mountains of California surveys Sierra Nevada geology, forests, meadows, and storms with a blend of careful observation and expressive metaphor. The Yosemite offers a concentrated portrait of that valley’s cliffs, waterfalls, and living communities, complemented by focused essays such as The Treasures of the Yosemite and Yosemite Glaciers. Picturesque California broadens the frame to the Pacific Slope and nearby ranges, pairing descriptive text with scenographic emphasis. Across these writings, Muir’s attention to structure and process—how granite, ice, water, wind, and living things shape one another—anchors his aesthetic rapture in physical explanation.
Muir’s role as a public advocate comes to the fore in Our National Parks and The National Parks and Forest Reservations. These works articulate the social and ecological purposes of reserves, arguing for public enjoyment inseparable from protection. Save the Redwoods extends that advocacy to specific forests, stating the case for preserving ancient trees as living communities and national heritage. Features of the Proposed Yosemite National Park and related pieces show him working at the boundary of science and policy, translating field knowledge into practical recommendations. Together, these texts chart the emergence of a conservation ethic grounded in experience, reasoning, and a persuasive civic voice.
At the heart of Muir’s personal canon stands My First Summer in the Sierra, a season-long record drawn from his 1869 herding job in the high country. Using diary materials shaped into a continuous narrative, he traces daily ascents, camp life, and the close study of plants and waters. The book’s premise is simple—one summer of work and wandering—yet it becomes a laboratory for his language of delight, attention, and moral insight. Yosemite in Spring and Yosemite in Winter, included here as companion essays, demonstrate how the same landscapes transform with season, each time eliciting new forms of inquiry and praise.
Yosemite’s sister valley, Hetch Hetchy, threads through several pieces, notably The Hetch Hetchy Valley and A Rival of the Yosemite, which present its meadows, walls, and riverine character. The Yosemite cluster as a whole—augmented by Features of the Proposed Yosemite National Park, The Treasures of the Yosemite, and Yosemite Glaciers—offers a layered portrait: scenic, geological, botanical, and civic. Muir writes as a field naturalist who has mapped moraines and polished pavements, as a walker who has slept beneath pines, and as an advocate who believes that exact knowledge strengthens public affection and informed stewardship.
Northward, Travels in Alaska records journeys among fjords, glaciers, and coastal forests, observing tides, ice tongues, and Native settlements. The Cruise of the Corwin gathers notes from an Arctic voyage, attentive to sea ice, bird life, and the high-latitude weather that tests ships and people. Stickeen: The Story of a Dog distills one hazardous day on the ice into a study of perception, courage, and companionship, using a single encounter to illuminate the larger drama of northern exploration. These narratives extend Muir’s range from granite domes to tidewater glaciers, preserving his method: watch closely, move lightly, learn by going.
Beyond the Sierra and Alaska, Muir’s itineraries traverse the American West and South. A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf follows his postwar tramp from the Midwest to the Gulf Coast, observing swamps, sandhills, and coastal winds, and discovering new flora along the way. Steep Trails assembles excursions across the Great Basin and other ranges, meditating on deserts, forests, and storm-scoured plateaus. The Grand Cañon of the Colorado celebrates a chasm carved by time and river, treating color, strata, and light as living forces. In each region, the premise is direct encounter, the result a braided account of travel, science, and reverence.
Studies in Sierra and related pieces such as Yosemite Glaciers exemplify Muir’s analytical prose. Here he advances and documents glacial explanations for valley forms, moraines, and polished bedrock, drawing from field measurements, seasonal watching, and comparative observation. While his rhetoric in the descriptive books can soar, in these studies he proceeds by careful accumulation of evidence, always returning to what rock faces and stream patterns reveal. This scientific backbone gives his celebratory pages their tensile strength; praise never floats free of process, and beauty is shown to inhere in the dynamics of earth and climate.
Two memorial sketches, Edward Henry Harriman and Edward Taylor Parsons, place Muir within the civic and institutional fabric of his time. The first reflects on a figure associated with exploration and transportation whose interests intersected with northern fieldwork and scientific enterprise. The second honors a leader within the Sierra Club, an organization in which Muir played a formative role, and underscores the importance of collaboration, leadership, and organizational continuity to conservation. These pieces show Muir as observer of character and contributor to a community of action as well as to a literature of place.
Across all these forms, several unities emerge. Muir’s sentences move with the gait of a walker: patient, resilient, given to bursts of speed when the view opens. He pairs lucid description with metaphor that signals kinship among stones, waters, trees, animals, and people. His ethics arise from attention; knowledge gained on foot becomes argument for care. He writes in a register hospitable to general readers yet precise enough for naturalists, trusting that delight deepens understanding. The works here display a style that can be ecstatic without vagueness, intimate without confession, and argumentative without rancor.
The significance of Muir’s writing lies in its durable synthesis of seeing, knowing, and acting. By bringing together travel narrative, natural history, seasonal sketch, scientific study, commemorative essay, and public address, this collection shows how a life in the open air became a language for public purpose. The Wilderness Essays is not a definitive edition of every page Muir wrote, nor a scholarly variorum. It is a carefully chosen body of complete books and representative shorter pieces that, taken together, allow readers to follow an arc from first wanderings to mature advocacy, and to encounter a voice that still shapes how we imagine and defend wild places.
Author Biography
John Muir (1838–1914) was a Scottish-born American naturalist, writer, and conservation advocate whose prose and public campaigns helped shape the United States’ national park idea. Settling his attention on the Sierra Nevada, he wrote with lyrical precision about mountains, forests, and glaciers while urging legal protection for wild landscapes. As a founder and long-serving president of the Sierra Club, he linked observation, science, and civic activism. The works gathered in this collection—ranging from field reports and magazine essays to books—trace the evolution of his thought from early Yosemite studies to mature syntheses such as The Mountains of California and Our National Parks, and on to posthumous travel narratives.
Born in Dunbar, Scotland, Muir emigrated to the United States in the mid-nineteenth century and came of age on the Wisconsin frontier. He informally attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where courses in botany and geology, and the guidance of Jeanne and Ezra Carr, encouraged disciplined field observation. After a factory accident temporarily impaired his sight, he undertook a long pedestrian journey documented later in A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf. His reading of natural philosophers and poets, notably Alexander von Humboldt and Ralph Waldo Emerson, reinforced a worldview that joined careful measurement with spiritual awe, a synthesis that would characterize his mature prose and scientific arguments.
In 1868 Muir reached California and soon devoted himself to the Sierra Nevada, especially Yosemite Valley. Writing initially for regional magazines, he developed his glacial interpretation of the valley’s origins in the serial Studies in the Sierra. Field pieces such as Yosemite Glaciers, Yosemite in Winter, Yosemite in Spring, and the dramatic Snow-Storm on Mount Shasta combined firsthand observation with accessible science. He also served as editor-in-chief of the lavish Picturesque California, shaping a broad public portrait of the West. Through these early efforts he gained a national readership and a reputation as a persuasive explainer of alpine processes and mountain ecology.
Books consolidated his vision and widened his influence. The Mountains of California offered a sustained natural history of the Sierra’s forests, meadows, and ice. Our National Parks broadened the frame, surveying protected landscapes while arguing for expanded preservation. The Yosemite distilled decades of experience into a definitive guide and defense, while My First Summer in the Sierra presented the formative 1869 shepherd season that awakened his lifelong vocation. Complementary advocacy essays—Features of the Proposed Yosemite National Park, The National Parks and Forest Reservations, The Treasures of the Yosemite, and seasonal sketches—linked literary craft to policy, helping readers see and value specific places and systems.
Muir ranged far beyond California. Repeated journeys to Alaska, beginning in the late 1870s, yielded Travels in Alaska, a narrative alive to glaciers, coastal forests, and Indigenous communities he encountered. The Cruise of the Corwin drew on an Arctic voyage with a revenue steamer, while Stickeen: The Story of a Dog distilled a single perilous day on an Alaskan glacier into a classic tale of character and ice. His western wanderings appear in Steep Trails, and his long walk after convalescence became A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf. He also interpreted desert grandeur in The Grand Cañon of the Colorado. Several titles were assembled posthumously from journals.
Writing was inseparable from advocacy. As a cofounder of the Sierra Club in 1892 and its longtime president, Muir argued for public ownership and careful stewardship of scenic and scientific wonders. He pressed for park extensions and forest reserves through articles and testimony, notably Features of the Proposed Yosemite National Park and The National Parks and Forest Reservations. He championed kindred causes in essays such as The Hetch Hetchy Valley and A Rival of the Yosemite, defending that glacial valley from damming, and in Save the Redwoods, an appeal that circulated posthumously. His correspondence and meetings with policy makers—including President Theodore Roosevelt—amplified these campaigns.
In his later years Muir organized notes, revised earlier articles, and produced the graceful late books My First Summer in the Sierra and The Yosemite. The defeat at Hetch Hetchy in the early 1910s saddened him, but it also clarified for supporters the stakes of conservation. Muir died in 1914, leaving manuscripts that editors shaped into Travels in Alaska, A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf, The Cruise of the Corwin, and Steep Trails. His legacy endures in protected places, in the continuing work of the Sierra Club, and in a literary canon that marries science, ethics, and beauty, helping readers imagine a generous public landscape.
Historical Context
John Muir’s Wilderness Essays span the decades from Reconstruction through the Progressive Era, roughly the 1860s to the 1910s. They emerge from a United States rapidly transformed by industrialization, railroads, and westward expansion, yet also animated by scientific curiosity and a nascent conservation movement. California’s Sierra Nevada, Alaska’s glaciers, and the canyonlands of the Southwest became testing grounds for new ideas about public lands, national identity, and the moral uses of nature. The pieces gathered here were first written for magazines, speeches, and books, then reprinted across the century, shaping—and being shaped by—policies that created national parks, forest reserves, and, eventually, a preservationist tradition.
Muir’s earliest Yosemite writings—such as Studies in the Sierra and companion pieces like Yosemite Glaciers, Yosemite in Winter, and Yosemite in Spring—belong to the 1870s debate over how the valley was formed. California’s state geologist Josiah Whitney favored catastrophic origins; Muir argued for glacial sculpture drawn from close observation. Published in regional and national periodicals, these essays aligned with the broader acceptance of Ice Age geology in American science. They also followed the 1864 Yosemite Grant, which placed the valley and Mariposa Grove under California’s care, anchoring Muir’s research in a landscape already entangled with questions of public stewardship.
Snow-Storm on Mount Shasta recounts an 1870s ascent that nearly turned fatal, dramatizing the hazards of high-country exploration when meteorology and rescue infrastructure were limited. The piece reflects a broader mountaineering culture that grew with the spread of rail lines to California and with scientific societies promoting fieldwork. Muir’s partnership with local mountaineers like Jerome Fay underscores how frontier skill and observation underwrote scientific insight. The narrative’s immediacy served a periodical press eager for firsthand adventure reports, while also reinforcing Muir’s conviction—formed through bodily trial—that alpine weather, snowpack, and glaciers were dynamic, measurable forces shaping the Sierra.
Picturesque California (1888–1890), a lavishly illustrated subscription project edited by Muir, stood at the crossroads of art, tourism, and regional boosterism. Following the model of Gilded Age “view books,” it circulated engravings and essays that introduced distant readers to western scenery from Alaska to Mexico. The work enlisted leading artists and photographers and benefited from railroad distribution networks that made scenic travel newly accessible. Muir’s editorial framing balanced celebration with caution, anticipating tensions between commercial spectacle and preservation. The set helped anchor California within a national imagination increasingly captivated by the West’s aesthetic and recreational possibilities.
The Mountains of California (1894) consolidated two decades of field observation into a natural history of the Sierra. It appeared as the national park idea matured, influenced by Yellowstone’s 1872 precedent and growing advocacy around Yosemite and Sequoia (both established as national parks in 1890, though Yosemite Valley remained under state control until 1906). The book also arrived shortly after the Sierra Club’s founding in 1892, with Muir as its first president, signaling a new civic structure for conservation. Its detailed botany, meteorology, and glaciology advanced a scientifically grounded aesthetics that would fuel campaigns to reserve landscapes from logging and development.
Our National Parks (1901) belongs to the Progressive Era’s surge in federal conservation. In the 1890s, presidents used authority under the General Revision Act of 1891 to proclaim forest reserves; Congress then set administrative rules in 1897. By 1901, Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency promised expansion of protected lands. Muir’s essays surveyed Yosemite, Sequoia, Yellowstone, and Mount Rainier (park status in 1899), translating field science into a democratic argument for public enjoyment. They also foreshadowed philosophical rifts: Muir’s preservationism, centered on intrinsic value, increasingly diverged from utilitarian conservation associated with Gifford Pinchot’s sustained-yield forestry.
My First Summer in the Sierra (1911) revisits Muir’s 1869 season as a sheepherder and botanist in the trans-Sierran meadows, filtering pastoral recollection through Progressive Era policy debates. Sheep, which Muir dubbed “hoofed locusts,” had been flashpoints in conflicts over grazing on public land. The narrative circulated as the U.S. Forest Service, created in 1905, was asserting regulation over grazing and timber on federal reserves. By juxtaposing the exuberant discovery of high-country ecology with critiques of overgrazing and fire, the book tied personal awakening to the broader shift from frontier extraction toward regulated, science-informed land management.
The Yosemite (1912) served as both scientific synthesis and guide during a time of infrastructure growth and increasing visitation. Congress had created Yosemite National Park in 1890, but the valley and Mariposa Grove returned to federal management only in 1906, a victory for reformers concerned with mismanagement. Roads, hotels, and stage routes expanded access, spurred by rail links to the Sierra’s foothills. Muir’s meticulous accounts of granite domes, waterfalls, and sequoia groves addressed a public learning to experience parks as shared patrimony. The book’s authority rested on decades of observation, yet it also functioned as policy advocacy by educating a mass audience.
Features of the Proposed Yosemite National Park (1890) exemplifies the link between magazine advocacy and congressional action. Published in the Century—whose associate editor Robert Underwood Johnson partnered with Muir—the essay argued for federal protection of high-country watersheds surrounding the state-held valley. It helped forge a coalition of scientists, editors, and legislators that culminated in the September 1890 act creating Yosemite National Park (excluding the valley and Mariposa Grove). The piece reflects strategies common to the period: precise natural description, appeals to national pride, and warnings about grazing and logging that threatened hydrology, scenery, and scientific study.
A Rival of the Yosemite and The Hetch Hetchy Valley together trace the fate of Tuolumne’s glacial valley as a test case for preservation. Muir’s early praise framed Hetch Hetchy as a twin to Yosemite; later essays opposed San Francisco’s plan to dam it for water and power after the 1906 earthquake sharpened supply concerns. The controversy, waged from roughly 1903 to 1913, exposed a fracture between preservationists and utilitarian conservationists, with Gifford Pinchot supporting the project. Congress’s Raker Act (1913) authorized the dam, a defeat Muir felt keenly. The episode became a cautionary tale shaping future park protections.
The Treasures of the Yosemite and seasonal sketches such as Yosemite in Winter and Yosemite in Spring expanded the museum-of-nature ideal animating park advocacy. By celebrating wildflowers, snow-buried forests, and hydrologic cycles, these essays supplied aesthetic and scientific vocabularies for an emerging tourist public. They also worked in dialogue with photography and painting that circulated through rail depots and illustrated magazines, aligning interpretation with infrastructure. As roads and trails multiplied, Muir’s attention to fragile meadows and sequoia groves emphasized carrying-capacity concerns that would later animate ranger-led education and, eventually, wilderness zoning within national parks.
Travels in Alaska, Stickeen: The Story of a Dog, and The Cruise of the Corwin grow from late nineteenth-century northern exploration. After the 1867 U.S. purchase of Alaska, federal cutters, missionaries, and scientists moved along the panhandle and into the Arctic. Muir’s 1879 and 1880 trips among Tlingit communities and tidewater glaciers, his 1881 newspaper dispatches from the revenue cutter Corwin searching for the Jeannette and missing whalers, and the celebrated crevasse-crossing tale with Samuel Hall Young’s dog Stickeen fed public fascination with ice. These works advanced glacier science and strengthened arguments to protect Alaska’s coastal forests and fjords.
A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf, compiled posthumously from his 1867–1868 journal, sets Muir’s botanizing against the Reconstruction South. Walking through Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, and Florida, he recorded war-scarred towns, longleaf pine ecosystems, swamps, and coastal hammocks while contending with disease and limited transport. The journey reflects the era’s scientific itinerancy—naturalists collecting specimens as rail networks were still uneven—and the transnational circuits of ideas and plants linking the Gulf to the Caribbean. His subsequent passage to Cuba and then to New York foreshadowed a westward pivot to California that would place him at the center of Pacific-slope conservation.
Steep Trails gathers essays from the Great Basin, Utah, the Columbia River, and the Northwest during a period when federal surveys, railroads, and booster literature mapped and marketed the interior West. Muir’s 1888 ascent of Mount Rainier, later folded into this volume, intersected with regional campaigns that culminated in Mount Rainier’s designation as a national park in 1899. His attention to basalt flows, juniper uplands, and Washington’s forests confronted the rapid expansion of logging and grazing. Written for general audiences, the pieces popularized geologic time and plant succession while urging restraint in landscapes newly opened by the Northern and Southern transcontinentals.
The National Parks and Forest Reservations and Save the Redwoods frame Muir’s public-policy voice amid evolving federal authority. The 1890s saw presidents proclaim forest reserves under the 1891 act; the 1905 transfer of forest administration to the U.S. Forest Service formalized utilitarian management. Muir’s 1895 address defended parks as sanctuaries distinct from commercial forestry. His 1908 Save the Redwoods essay responded to intensive logging in California’s north coast, anticipating the 1918 founding of Save the Redwoods League and later state and national parks. Both texts tie scientific understanding to civic duty, arguing that beauty and biodiversity merited legal protection.
Two shorter portraits, Edward Henry Harriman and Edward Taylor Parsons, illuminate the alliances that carried conservation forward. Harriman, the railroad magnate who organized the 1899 Harriman Alaska Expedition that included Muir and leading scientists, exemplified how corporate wealth could underwrite field science and publicity. Parsons, a Sierra Club director and key figure in the Hetch Hetchy fight, represented grassroots organizational energy; after his death in 1914, the Parsons Memorial Lodge in Tuolumne Meadows commemorated that civic commitment. These essays show Muir situating conservation within a network of patrons, editors, scientists, and volunteers who translated advocacy into durable institutions.
The Grand Cañon of the Colorado reflects early twentieth-century fascination with the Southwest, as railroads and the Fred Harvey system promoted tourism and scientific visitation. Written around the time of Muir’s travels there in the early 1900s, it preceded Theodore Roosevelt’s 1908 national monument proclamation and the canyon’s elevation to national park status in 1919. By emphasizing geologic process and sublime scale, Muir joined a chorus of voices making the canyon a symbol of national heritage. The essay also reveals how scenic promotion and preservation could be mutually reinforcing, even as they raised questions about development at the rim and along river corridors.
Synopsis (Selection)
Sierra and Yosemite Cycle (The Mountains of California; My First Summer in the Sierra; The Yosemite; Studies in Sierra; Snow-Storm on Mount Shasta; 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 unified portrait of the Sierra Nevada and especially Yosemite, these works combine lyrical field observation with clear natural history and geomorphology. Muir explains glaciation, seasonal rhythms, and the character of specific valleys and peaks, moving from immersive seasonal notes to comprehensive syntheses of place. Interwoven are arguments for thoughtful park boundaries and the protection of sister valleys such as Hetch Hetchy, presenting these landscapes as scientific troves and shared spiritual commons.
Alaska Explorations and Tales (Travels in Alaska; The Cruise of the Corwin; Stickeen: The Story of a Dog)
These writings follow coastal and insular Alaska by ship and on foot, where tidewater glaciers, storm weather, and dense forests invite close study. A compact adventure with a brave dog on the ice sits alongside broader travelogues and expedition journals, balancing hazard with steady observation. The tone is exploratory and exact, extending glacial insight while cultivating humility before living ice and wild companions.
Early Foot Journey South (A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf)
A solitary, botanizing trek to the Gulf Coast unfolds as dated field notes and reflective sketches. The narrative pairs hardship and hospitality with a catalog of plants, soils, and watersheds, using the road as a mobile laboratory for attention. It reads as a manifesto in motion, where simplicity and curiosity turn travel into a way of knowing a continent.
National Parks and Conservation Advocacy (Our National Parks; The National Parks and Forest Reservations; Save the Redwoods)
These essays make a public case for preserving remarkable landscapes, joining vivid description with practical arguments for legal protection and wise management. Muir develops a civic language for stewardship that prizes biodiversity, longevity, and public benefit over short-term extraction, with special emphasis on venerable forests like the redwoods. The voice is exhortatory yet celebratory, enlisting readers in a durable ethic of care.
Western Wanderings and Canyons (Steep Trails; The Grand Cañon of the Colorado)
Trail narratives and geologic vignettes survey mountains, plateaus, and deserts across the American West, rendering weather, stone, and ascent as teachers. A focused meditation on the Grand Canyon examines scale, erosive time, and the mind’s capacity for awe. Together they highlight how rugged travel clarifies perception and how rock records the story of the land.
Picturesque California
A gallery of California scenes surveys coasts, forests, and mountain districts with a painterly eye for composition and light. Broad panoramas are balanced by telling particulars, inviting readers to inhabit the state’s varied physiography rather than merely view it from afar. The mood is expansive and inviting, establishing a visual and rhetorical palette that recurs throughout his writing.
Portraits of Conservationists (Edward Henry Harriman; Edward Taylor Parsons)
These memorial sketches honor allies in the conservation cause, tracing character, energy, and practical influence through personal recollection. Muir links individual commitments to public landscapes, showing how private action can shape shared goods. The tone is elegiac and collegial, adding a human thread to the broader environmental project.
The Wilderness Essays
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.
