My First Summer in the Sierra

By John Muir and Galen Rowell

From the photographer who brought Thoreau's Walden and Cape Cod to life comes a new work combining classic literature with brand-new photography. This time, Scot Miller takes on the seminal work of John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra. The book details Muir's first extended trip to the Sierra Nevada in what is now Yosemite National Park, a landscape that entranced him immediately and had a profound effect on his life. The towering waterfalls, natural rock formations, and abundant plant and animal life helped Muir develop his views of the natural world, views that would eventually lead him to push for the creation of the national parks.

My First Summer in the Sierra is illustrated with Miller's stunning photographs, showcasing the dramatic landscape of the High Sierra plus John Muir's illustrations from the original edition and several previously unpublished illustrations from his 1911 manuscript. The publication of My First Summer in the Sierra inspired many to journey there, and this newly illustrated edition will surely inspire many more.

This book is being published in collaboration with Yosemite Conservancy and, for each copy sold, Scot Miller is making a donation to Yosemite Conservancy. My First Summer in the Sierra won the National Outdoor Book Award.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Mar 10, 2011
• ISBN: 9780547548715

John Muir

John Muir (21 April 1838 – 24 December 1914) was a Scottish-born American naturalist, author, and early advocate of preservation of wilderness in the United States.

Book preview

Lembert Dome, storm light

First published by Houghton Mifflin Company in 1911.

The text in this volume comes from the 1998 Mariner Books edition.

Foreword copyright © 2011 by Dayton Duncan and Ken Burns

Color photographs copyright © 2011 by Scot Miller

Muir journal pages courtesy of John Muir Papers, Holt-Atherton Special Collections, University of the Pacific Library. Copyright 1984 Muir-Hanna Trust

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [e-mail] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

www.hmhco.com

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Muir, John, 1838–1914.

My first summer in the Sierra / by John Muir;

photographs by Scot Miller.

p. cm.

First published by Houghton Mifflin Company in 1911.

Illustrated edition of the American classic.

ISBN: 978-0-618-98851-8

1. Muir, John, 1838–1914. 2. Natural history—Sierra Nevada (Calif. and Nev.) 3. Sierra Nevada (Calif. and Nevada) I. Miller, Scot. II. Title.

QH31.M9A3 2012 508.794'4—dc22

eISBN 978-0-547-54871-5

v4.1016

TO THE SIERRA CLUB OF CALIFORNIA

Faithful defender of the people’s playgrounds

Upper Yosemite Fall

Foreword

IN THE EARLY summer of 1869, when John Muir left on foot for the high country of California’s Sierra Nevada in the company of 2,050 bleating sheep, he had no idea the journey would utterly transform his life and, in doing so, change the course of our nation’s history.

Walking great distances—experiencing his adopted land through the soles of his shoes—was nothing new to Muir. Two years earlier, he had ambled a thousand miles from Indiana to Florida, happily botanizing along the way and keeping a journal in which he had inscribedhis name and address as John Muir, Earth-planet, Universe. That walk was to have continued in the wilds of South America, but a bout of malaria caused him to change plans, and in 1868 Muir found himself on the docks of San Francisco with an itch to see a place he had read about in a magazine. It was called Yosemite, nearly 200 more miles away.

So, of course, he walked there: over Pacheco Pass, across Central Valley fields, knee-deep in flowers, through the wooded foothills and into the already-famous valley and its nearby grove of giant sequoias. It was a month of walking for a week’s worth of sightseeing, in a remarkable place that only recently, in 1864, had been set aside by Congress and entrusted to the State of California for protection.

Having spent the wet winter of 1868–69 cooped up in a dismal little hut near the town of Snelling, reading Shakespeare, Muir was aching to stretch his long legs once more when the seasons changed. Pat Delaney, one of the many mutton barons of the area, planned to move his herd up to the headwaters of the Merced and Tuolumne rivers, fattening them on the alpine meadows of the public domain for the summer, high above the sweltering heat of the Central Valley. He invited Muir to come along, and the Scottish-born wanderer jumped at the chance—even if by mileage standards this journey would be a mere stroll around the block compared to his two previous epic walks, and even if it meant spending more time with sheep, a species the generally big-hearted Muir was coming to view with increasing disdain.

He accepted because it would permit him to drink in more of the mountains he had tasted only briefly the year before. And he accepted because, at age thirty-one, he was still searching for a direction to his life. What shall I do? Where shall I go? he had asked himself in his journal. Little did he know that Delaney’s sheep would lead him to his destiny.

This book is Muir’s chronicle of that transformative trip, the greatest of all the months of my life, he wrote, the most truly, divinely free, boundless like eternity, immortal. Published in 1911, more than forty years after the fact, when Muir was in his seventies, it benefits from the older man’s perspective, as well as his considerable writing and editing skills, honed over the intervening decades in which he had used the written word to spread his gospel of Nature and become as well known as Yosemite itself. But it is based on the thirty-one-year-old’s journal, with all the fresh immediacy and ecstatic emotion of those initial moments of discovery.

Writing, Muir once said, is like the life of a glacier, one eternal grind. My First Summer in the Sierra, his best and most enduring book, extends the analogy. Just as the unforgettable granite domes of Yosemite, so impressive, impassive, and seemingly impermeable, were molded and shaped by patient glaciation, each journal entry here has been sculpted and polished by the man who considered glaciers proof of Nature as a poet, an enthusiastic workingman.

Everything in Nature called destruction must be a creation, a change from beauty to beauty, Muir advises us in these pages, distilling what he learned during his life-changing three and a half months in the Sierra. In the mountains he called the Range of Light, such insights come more easily, he said, because everything is perfectly clean and pure and full of divine lessons . . . until the hand of God becomes visible.

And the central lesson was a revelation of timeless unity—a unity connecting not only all human beings, or even all living things, but the entirety of creation itself: When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. . . . The whole wilderness seems to be alive and familiar, full of humanity. The very stones seem talkative, sympathetic, brotherly.

Muir’s journal records the date of this revelation as June 6, 1869, only four days into the trip. They had reached an elevation of about 2,500 feet above sea level and made the transition from black oaks to yellow pines. Through an opening in the woods, Muir could see snowy peaks, seemingly within reach and extending an irresistible invitation. Here Muir experienced what he calls a conversion . . . complete and wholesome:

We are now in the mountains and they are within us, kindling enthusiasm, making every nerve quiver, filling every pore and cell of us. Our flesh-and-bone tabernacle seems transparent as glass to the beauty about us, as if truly an inseparable part of it, thrilling with the air and trees, streams and rocks, in the waves of the sun—a part of all nature, neither old nor young, sick nor well, but immortal.

Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, leaders of American Transcendentalism (and intellectual heroes of Muir’s) had expressed a similar creed, but neither of them as profoundly or with such a sense of complete surrender. Muir would reiterate it throughout his summer journal and then preach it for the rest of his life, ultimately inspiring millions of Americans to consider the bounteous continent they inhabited as something sacred, something to treasure and preserve rather than commercialize and exploit.

Everything Muir believed, everything that defined him as a person radiates from these pages. We meet both the wide-eyed youngster in the throes of first experiences and the wise old man of the mountains (now with an editor’s pen) refining them with the insights of a lifetime. Muir the mystic is present, but equally so is Muir the scientist.

The same day of his absolute conversion to the religion of Nature, June 6, Muir writes lengthy descriptions of the sugar pine and incense cedar, the Douglas squirrel, and nearly a dozen plants (many of them identified only by their Latin binomial). He discourses on the beauty of clouds (sky mountains in whose pearly hills and dales the streams take their rise) but also on the essential role they play in the cycles of the natural world.

Nothing escaped his gaze and study. His journal entries include comparisons of black ants to red ants and detailed observations on everything from house flies to bears, from lizards to what would become his favorite bird, the little water ouzel. On one day, he devotes three pages to trace the history of a single randrop; on another, he writes a two-page narrative on the flight and sound of a grasshopper he encountered atop North Dome, complete with a sketch of the insect’s trajectory.

More than anything, Muir’s infectious enthusiasm is on full display. On July 15—a day of days in Muir’s own accounting—the view from a ridge over Indian Canyon prompts him to throw up his arms and shout in a wild burst of ecstasy. A few hours later, excitedly following Yosemite Creek, listening to it singing the last of its mountain songs on the way to its fate, he reaches the rim of the valley, where the stream makes its spectacular 2,420-foot leap to the bottom. He pauses, weighing the risks of attempting a closer view. I therefore concluded not to venture farther, he wrote, but did nonetheless.

But did nonetheless. His desire to immerse himself in the natural world could sometimes veer into impulsiveness, but it sprang, like Yosemite Creek, from a pure source. And once he surrendered to it, it filled his spirit with music, pushed him forward, and never failed him.

That first summer in the Sierra, John Muir fell in love with Yosemite and found his voice, which he used to awaken a nation to a beauty beyond thought everywhere, beneath, above, made and being made forever. He would use it to save Yosemite’s high country as a national park, protecting the alpine meadows from the descendants of Delaney’s sheep, the voracious hoofed locusts whose harm, he declared, goes to the heart. Then he would save Yosemite Valley as well, transferring it from state control to become part of the national park. Other national parks would bear his mark: Mount Rainier, Sequoia, Kings Canyon, Glacier Bay, and Petrified Forest among them. Presidents would glory in the chance to spend a few days with him in the wilderness he adored. Generations of Americans concerned about the fate of nature in their country would look to him as the headwater of their movement. And in recognition of his special place in American history, we decided that our PBS documentary, The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, rightfully should both begin and end with the Scottish brogue of the man who called upon his adopted country to find its salvation in the same place he found his: the wilderness.

Muir’s voice, so magnificently on display in these pages, remained as strong and clear and pure in his seventies, while he prepared the text for publication, as it was in those youthful days of his first enthrallment. One hundred years later, like Yosemite Creek, it still sings. Life seems neither long nor short, he tells us, and we take no more heed to save time or make haste than do the trees and stars. This is true freedom, a good practical sort of immortality.

Dayton Duncan

Ken Burns

Walpole, New Hampshire

January 2010

High Sierra afternoon

Merced River and Yosemite Falls

Echo Peaks, moon rising

CHAPTER I

Through the Foothills with a Flock of Sheep

IN THE GREAT Central Valley of California there are only two seasons—spring and summer. The spring begins with the first rain-storm, which usually falls in November. In a few months the wonderful flowery vegetation is in full bloom, and by the end of May it is dead and dry and crisp, as if every plant had been roasted in an oven.

Then the lolling, panting flocks and herds are driven to the high, cool, green pastures of the Sierra. I was longing for the mountains about this time, but money was scarce and I couldn’t see how a bread supply was to be kept up. While I was anxiously brooding on the bread problem, so troublesome to wanderers, and trying to believe that I might learn to live like the wild animals, gleaning nourishment here and there from seeds, berries, etc., sauntering and climbing in joyful independence of money or baggage, Mr. Delaney, a sheep-owner, for whom I had worked a few weeks, called on me, and offered to engage me to go with his shepherd and flock to the headwaters of the Merced and Tuolumne Rivers—the very region I had most in mind. I was in the mood to accept work of any kind that would take me into the mountains whose treasures I had tasted last summer in the Yosemite region. The flock, he explained, would be moved gradually higher through the successive forest belts as the snow melted, stopping for a few weeks at the best places we came to. These I thought would be good centers of observation from which I might be able to make many telling excursions within a radius of eight or ten miles of the camps to learn something of the plants, animals, and rocks; for he assured me that I should be left perfectly free to follow my studies, I judged, however, that I was in no way the right man for the place, and freely explained my shortcomings, confessing that I was wholly unacquainted with the topography of the upper mountains, the streams that would have to be crossed, and the wild sheep-eating animals, etc.; in short that, what with bears, coyotes, rivers, cañons, and thorny, bewildering chaparral, I feared that half or more of his flock would be lost. Fortunately these shortcomings seemed insignificant to Mr, Delaney. The main thing, he said, was to have a man about the camp whom he could trust to see that the shepherd did his duty, and he assured me that the difficulties that seemed so formidable at a distance would vanish as we went on; encouraging me further by saying that the shepherd would do all the herding, that I could study plants and rocks and scenery as much as I liked, and that he would himself accompany us to the first main camp and make occasional visits to our higher ones to replenish our store of provisions and see how we prospered. Therefore I concluded to go, though still fearing, when I saw the silly sheep bouncing one by one through the narrow gate of the home corral to be counted, that of the two thousand and fifty many would never return.

I was fortunate in getting a fine St. Bernard dog for a companion. His master, a hunter with whom I was slightly acquainted, came to me as soon as he heard that I was going to spend the summer in the Sierra and begged me to take his favorite dog, Carlo, with me, for he feared that if he were compelled to stay all summer on the plains the fierce heat might be the death of him, I think I can trust you to be kind to him, he said, and I am sure he will be good to you. He knows all about the mountain animals, will guard the camp, assist in managing the sheep, and in every way be found able and faithful. Carlo knew we were talking about him, watched our faces, and listened so attentively that I fancied he understood us. Calling him by name, I asked him if he was willing to go with me. He looked me in the face with eyes expressing wonderful intelligence, then turned to his master, and after permission was given by a wave of the hand toward me and a farewell patting caress, he quietly followed me as if he perfectly understood all that had been said and had known me always.

JUNE 3, 1869. This morning provisions, camp-kettles, blankets, plant-press, etc., were packed on two horses, the flock headed for the tawny foothills, and away we sauntered in a cloud of dust: Mr. Delaney, bony and tall, with sharply hacked profile like Don Quixote, leading the pack-horses, Billy, the proud shepherd, a Chinaman and a Digger Indian to assist in driving for the first few days in the brushy foothills, and myself with notebook tied to my belt.

The home ranch from which we set out is on the south side of the Tuolumne River near French Bar, where the foothills of metamorphic gold-bearing slates dip below the stratified deposits of the Central Valley. We had not gone more than a mile before some of the old leaders of the flock showed by the eager, inquiring way they ran and looked ahead that they were thinking of the high pastures they had enjoyed last summer. Soon the whole flock seemed to be hopefully excited, the mothers calling their lambs, the lambs replying in tones wonderfully human, their fondly quavering calls interrupted now and then by hastily snatched mouthfuls of withered grass. Amid all this seeming babel of baas as they streamed over the hills every mother and child recognized each other’s voice. In case a tired lamb, half asleep in the smothering dust, should fail to answer, its mother would come running back through the flock toward the spot whence its last response was heard, and refused to be comforted until she found it, the one of a thousand, though to our eyes and ears all seemed alike.

Minding the sheep

Rainy Day, Sierra foothills

The flock traveled at the rate of about a mile an hour, outspread in the form of an irregular triangle, about a hundred yards wide at the base, and a hundred and fifty yards long, with a crooked, ever-changing point made up of the strongest foragers, called the leaders, which, with the most active of those scattered along the ragged sides of the main body, hastily explored nooks in the rocks and bushes for grass and leaves; the lambs and feeble old mothers dawdling in the rear were called the tail end.

SHEEP IN THE MOUNTAINS

About noon the heat was hard to bear; the poor sheep panted pitifully and tried to stop in the shade of every tree they came to, while we gazed with eager longing through the dim burning glare toward the snowy mountains and streams, though not one was in sight. The landscape is only wavering foothills roughened here and there with bushes and trees and outcropping masses of slate.