Sierra by James Martin

Author:James Martin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-59485-725-6
Publisher: The Mountaineers Books
Published: 2006-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Ice encrusts an oak in Yosemite Valley.

The morning sun blazes over the summit of Middle Palisade, seen from above Palisade Lakes en route to Cirque Pass.

The General Sherman Giant Sequoia (partially lit, center) is the largest living thing on the surface of the earth.

Muir

“The power of the wild coursed through him.”

Angels Wings in Sequoia National Park are among the most elegant granite sculptures in the range.

Muir

When I first encountered the writings of John Muir, I felt an instant kinship. He wrote a florid Victorian prose, awash in adjectives and almost flying apart with enthusiasm. He married the mystic vision of a Saint Francis with a hard-headed Scot’s practicality, gushing one moment about God’s light and deducing the path of ancient glaciers from striations on granite the next. I was struggling to reconcile a need for logical rigor with a powerful response to beauty. The disparate elements of Muir’s character seemed to mirror my own, or so it seemed to a sixteen-year-old.

I decided to approach the wilderness his way. There were harsh lessons ahead for a coddled suburbanite planning to emulate a nineteenth-century ascetic. Muir was indifferent to discomfort. He hiked for days carrying nothing but a few crusts of bread in his coat pocket and slept where night found him. In forests he fashioned a bed from evergreen boughs, but in the high country he huddled amid boulders, shivering. If he found fuel for a fire, he fell asleep next to the flames, waking when the fire died. Muir moved quickly. He could cover twenty-five miles a day without a trail. At the end of a trip he returned skinny but exalted.

Inspired by Muir’s accounts of his travels in the Sierra, I decided to hike in California’s Santa Cruz Mountains carrying nothing but a Sierra Club tin cup, a wool blanket, and a bag of dried oatmeal. I walked one autumn weekend to a waterfall in Big Basin State Park. It was a cold, damp camp. I chewed my oatmeal and chased it with water. When night came, I wrapped myself tightly in the blanket, but the moist coastal damp penetrated the wool so I spent the night shaking against the cold. I decided to add a few creature comforts to my kit next time.

John Muir spent his first eleven years in Scotland and never lost his native brogue. The family emigrated to Wisconsin, where he worked the farm with his father. After a short stint at the University of Wisconsin, he temporarily lost his sight in an accident. When his vision returned, he vowed to devote the rest of his life to the study and appreciation of the natural world and set out wandering in 1863. He spent some time in Canada, perhaps to evade the Civil War draft. He found himself in Louisville, Kentucky, and decided to walk to the Gulf of Mexico. Upon arrival, he booked passage to Panama, crossed the Isthmus, and boarded another vessel to San Francisco. A final 250-mile hike though the flower fields

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