Selected Writings (Hardcover)

John Muir is a man I would have loved to have met on the trail. I would have enjoyed walking with him through Tuolumne Meadows in his beloved Yosemite listening to him discuss each wildflower by name; tell stories of each peak he climbed and the weather on that day; what he saw and how he felt. I wonder if he would have ranted and raved or kindly addressed and advocated for these wildlands in his lifelong pursuit to pro- tect them.
He might have said as he did in his essay, "The Wild Parks and Forest Reservations of the West," published in his book, Our National Parks: "Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over- civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life."And I would have agreed with him.
I like to imagine that he could walk with me now in the red rock desert of the Colorado Plateau where Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona share a common boundary point in what is known as the Four Corners. We would stand on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon in shared awe, where he once stood and proclaimed that it was "as if you had found it after death, on some other star; so incomparably lovely and grand and supreme is it above all the other cañons in our fire- moulded, earthquake-shaken, rain-washed, wave-washed, river and glacier sculptured world."
We might have discussed a wild life versus a domesticated one, and he would have exclaimed, "I have been too long wild" without any thought of changing his passionate stance toward the virtues of a life lived outside.