John Muir: forty years walking the mountains that became America's national parks

In the summer of 1869, a thirty-year-old man of Scottish descent followed a shepherd into the Sierra Nevada mountains of California.

He had no map, no proper camping gear, just a little dry bread, a notebook, and a blanket. He was going to spend the whole summer in the mountains, driving a flock of sheep through the meadows and pine forests of Yosemite.

His name was John Muir. That summer was his first walk in the valley that would make him famous.

That year he wrote in his journal: "This valley does not belong to me, but I am willing to give the rest of my life to knowing it."

A person who truly loves nature is not the one who visits the mountains on a weekend. It is the one willing to spend a lifetime understanding a single range.

Muir was a natural-born walker. As a young man he walked from Indiana to Florida, more than a thousand miles, taking notes on plants and geology along the way. He said walking was not exercise; it was a way of "becoming an animal again."

He lived for years in Yosemite, in a rough cabin, studying glaciers, watching pines. Other people saw rocks and trees; Muir saw how a river had cut a canyon over ten thousand years, how a granite dome had been polished smooth by ice. He wrote book after book about the mountains, prose as lovely as poetry. "Going to the mountains," he said, "is going home."

But in the late 19th century, mountains in California were not protected. Logging companies were cutting the trees. Ranchers set fire to the woods. Investors wanted to turn Yosemite into a resort. Muir watched thousand-year-old sequoias fall and felt it like flesh being cut.

He made a decision almost no one had made before: he would use his pen to defend nature.

In 1892 he founded the Sierra Club and began a campaign that lasted more than a decade, arguing that the federal government should protect Yosemite as a national park. He wrote to newspapers, essays, books, drawing those rocks, streams, and giant sequoias one by one into the American imagination.

In 1903 he invited President Theodore Roosevelt to camp with him in Yosemite. The two men spent three nights under a tent, and Muir told the president how precious that valley was. When Roosevelt went back, he signed the laws that made Yosemite a truly federally protected national park.

One person walked the mountains for forty years, and what came out of it was millions of acres of forest kept wild, forever.

Muir never became rich. He turned down every business offer and gave his writing proceeds to the conservation movement. When he died in 1914, the United States already had more than fifty national parks, from Yosemite to Yellowstone, from the sequoias to the Grand Canyon. Today hundreds of millions of people walk through those parks every year, on the paths he first walked.

He wrote: "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe."