1869 Travellers and adventurers in the American West, from the humble Forty-Niners to the grandly educated Francis Parkman (see 15 February), kept track of their encounters in journals. This was partly to keep a record, of course, but it was also to add physical detail to an account of strange and wonderful landscapes and settings that would otherwise seem simply fantastic in retrospect.
John Muir was one of the greatest of these natural observers – a Thoreau who actually went somewhere. Born in Dunbar, Scotland, he emigrated with his family to Wisconsin, and studied botany and geology at the University of Wisconsin. His articles on Yosemite and other sites of overwhelming natural beauty in the California Sierra, published in Harper’s, Scribner’s and The Century in the 1870s and 1880s, did much to promote the American National Parks movement. He founded the Sierra Club, which remains one of the country’s most effective ecological lobbying groups.
On this day, as published in My First Summer in the Sierra (1911), Muir ‘rambled’ to the top of Mount Hoffman – at 11,000 feet, ‘the highest point in life’s journey my feet have yet touched’. Although his account of the view is rhapsodic – ‘serene, majestic, snow-laden, sun-drenched, vast domes and ridges … [with] lakes and meadows in the hollows’ – it also deploys the language of scientific geology: ‘a ridge or spur about fourteen miles from the axis of the main range, perhaps a remnant brought into relief and isolated by unequal denudation.’
In fact, the two descriptive modes reinforce each other. Knowing the scientific names of things enhances their brilliance – indeed, makes them visible in the first place. ‘The surface of the ground, so dull and forbidding at first sight … shines and sparkles with crystals: mica, hornblende, feldspar, quartz, tourmaline … keen lance rays of every color flashing.’
But it was the trees that really got him going:
The hemlock (Tsuga Mertensiana) is the most beautiful conifer I have ever seen … It is now in full bloom, and the flowers, together with thousands of last season’s cones still clinging to the drooping sprays, display wonderful wealth of color, brown and purple and blue. Gladly I climbed the first tree I found in the midst of it.
So full of glee is he, the serious scientist is not embarrassed to confess climbing a tree like a child. It’s part of the fun – and also part of the close observation. No wonder his spirits remained high:
Toward sunset, enjoyed a fine run to camp, down the long south slopes, across ridges and ravines, gardens and avalanche gaps, through the firs and chaparral, enjoying wild excitement and excess of strength, and so ends a day that will never end.