In his classic book Desert Solitaire, Edward Abbey writes that the earth is ‘the only paradise we ever need if only we had eyes to see’. As well as the outdoors we can find those eyes in the words of writers on wilderness and landscape, including Abbey himself. These ‘visionaries of the wild’ are walkers, climbers, thinkers and philosophers who set out to inspire and educate with their love of the wild, and who, to a great extent, have built our view of the nature and value of landscape and wild places. I’ve been inspired by these writers for many years and re-read their works regularly, often lying in a tent or under the stars far from the noise of roads and the bright lights of the city.
Writings on wilderness go back thousands of years but our modern visionaries really begin around two hundred years ago with the Romantic Poets, especially Wordsworth, who greatly shaped the way we see the landscape of the Lake District. British poets continued to write about landscape, Ted Hughes being the best late twentieth century example, and it appears as a backdrop in many novels. Direct, non-fiction British writings on wild landscapes are rare though, and it is to the USA we have to look to find a tradition of wilderness writing
The first major literary figure in this movement for wilderness is Henry David Thoreau in the mid-nineteenth century, living and writing beside Walden Pond in Massachusetts and exploring the forests and rivers of the North-Eastern States. Thoreau put forward the idea that ‘it would be well perhaps if we were to spend more of our days and nights without any obstruction between us and the celestial bodies’ and, most famously, ‘in Wildness is the preservation of the world’. Thoreau saw human beings as part of nature, not apart from it, and wilderness as having great value to humans. It was the beginning of a revolution in thinking about wild places.
Although most noted for his contemplative sojourn at Walden Pond Thoreau also saw the value of walking. Indeed, in his essay entitled Walking, he wrote ‘I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least--and it is commonly more than that--sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements’.
Six years after Thoreau died in 1862 John Muir, an immigrant from Scotland, arrived in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California, a seminal event in the history of landscape and wilderness preservation. Whilst Thoreau had bemoaned the destruction of nature he did little to prevent it. Muir however used the power of words to describe, praise and defend the great landscapes of the Western USA, especially the Sierra Nevada.
Muir was a long distance walker who walked a thousand miles from Indianapolis to the Gulf of Mexico by the ‘wildest, leafiest, and least trodden way’, a mountaineer who made many first ascents in the Sierra Nevada, a scientist who showed that glaciers had carved the landscape of the Sierra Nevada and a campaigner who founded the Sierra Club and wrote articles that led to the creation of Yosemite National Park. He also wrote a vast number of books and articles from which many quotations are regularly pulled, perhaps most often, ‘do something for wildness and make the mountains glad’.
Muir revelled in every aspect of wilderness, climbing trees in storms to experience them swaying from side to side, edging to the brink of waterfalls to feel the shaking of the ground and the roar of the water, and sleeping out on snowy mountain sides with just a coat to cover him. One of my favourite quotes, which I try to remember as more rain sweeps across the Highlands, is ‘when I heard the storm and looked out I made haste to join it; for many of Nature’s finest lessons are to be found in her storms, and if careful to keep in right relations with them, we may go safely abroad with them, rejoicing in the grandeur and beauty of their works and ways’.
After Muir a succession of American writers wrote in praise of wilderness, the most significant of which in the first half of the twentieth century was Aldo Leopold, an ecologist and forester and founder of The Wilderness Society. Leopold developed the ideas of an ‘ecological conscience’ and a ‘land ethic’, major parts of current environmental thinking, writing that ‘conservation is a state of harmony between men and land’ and ‘we abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect’.
Leopold saw wild land as being necessary for human beings saying ‘wilderness areas are first of all a series of sanctuaries for the primitive arts of wilderness travel, especially canoeing and packing’ in his classic book A Sand County Almanac.
At the same time as Leopold was writing, a Scottish climber by the name of W. H. Murray was writing an equally important book called Mountaineering in Scotland, a book written twice in prisoner-of-war camps, the first version being destroyed by guards. Through the 1930s Murray had made many first ascents on rock and ice in the Scottish Highlands and was one of the premier mountaineers of the time. However, his climbing came out of a joy in wildness and his book is packed with wonderful descriptions of the mountains and the effect they had on him.
After a night-time winter ascent of Buachaille Etive Mor he wrote: ‘We had set out in search of adventure; and we had found beauty. Thus we had found both in their fuller sense; for in the architecture of hill and sky, as in great art and music, there is an everlasting harmony with which our own being had this night been made one. What more may we fairly ask of mountains?’ Realising that his beloved Highlands were threatened by development Murray became an active conservation campaigner, his greatest victory, for which we should be very thankful, being the prevention of a hydro-electric scheme in Glen Nevis. Of industrial developments in the Highlands he wrote in Scotland’s Mountains that ‘they could invariably be sited elsewhere than the regions of outstanding landscape quality; sometimes at a greater cost in money, which civilized man should be prepared to pay’ and lamented that ‘to find a wholly wild scene, unmarked by man’s building, one has to go ever farther into the hills’. That is even truer today.
Much of Murray’s prose is evocative, romantic and emotional. In this he is more in accord with American wilderness writers such as John Muir or Edward Abbey than most British outdoor writers. And here I think lies one reason for the lack of passion about wild land, the lack of a tradition of landscape writing. British writers tend to be more detached, more cool about their subjects, more reticent about their feelings, which results in work that may be descriptive and informative but which isn’t inspiring or visionary, which lacks intensity. British writers can be divided, crudely, into two camps: nature writers and adventure writers. The former give intricate accounts of plants and wildlife, the latter factual descriptions of climbs and long walks. Neither usually presents a vision of wildness. Some nature writers, like Gavin Maxwell, approach this but none succeed like Murray or the Americans. Adventure writers still tend towards the cliché of the stiff-upper lip, eschewing feelings towards beauty or the wonder of wild places.
In the USA the 1960s saw the emergence of two very different writers who have been a major influence on wilderness thinking and wilderness travel, Colin Fletcher and Edward Abbey. Fletcher is the walkers’ writer, the backpacker who wrote about walking 1,000 miles through desert and mountain in California and, for two months, solo along the Grand Canyon. No one has captured the spirit of what it is like to walk and camp in a wild landscape better than Colin Fletcher. Here he is on his 1,000 mile walk: ‘High above the West Walker River, I climbed the final snowbank into a 10,000 foot pass … Beyond the snowbank the mountainside dropped away again. And there below me lay the valley of the Silver King. Timbered slopes plunged down to a twisting V that held the creek. Two miles downstream, a meadow showed emerald green. Beyond, peak after Sierra peak stretched away northward to the horizon. There was no sign that man’s hand had touched a single leaf or a single blade of grass.’
Whilst not a major campaigner Fletcher does make it clear that we have a responsibility to preserve wilderness. At the time he walked through the Grand Canyon this amazing cleft in the earth was threatened with being dammed and flooded. Horrified by this Fletcher wrote that it was ‘vandalism’ and that we had ‘to shield from the blind fury of material ‘progress’ a work of time that is unique on the surface of our earth’, finishing ‘and we shall be judged you and I, by what we did or failed to do.’
Fletcher’s account of his walk through the Grand Canyon, The Man Who Walked Through Time, was published in the same year as another book that was to have repercussions for decades to come and introduce the world to the iconoclastic, controversial and distinctive voice of Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire. For the next 21 years until his death in 1989, Abbey was to be a provocative and challenging writer on wilderness and many other topics. Abbey’s love was for the deserts of the South-West USA where he walked, camped and paddled down rivers. His view of wilderness was that it was essential for human sanity and that preserving it came before anything else, writing ‘I come more and more to the conclusion that wilderness, in America or anywhere else, is the only thing left that is worth saving’, and ‘Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit.’
Fond of disappearing into the desert for days or weeks Abbey noted that ‘a journey into the wilderness is the freest, cheapest, most non-privileged of pleasures. Anyone with two legs and the price of a pair of army surplus combat boots may enter’.
Having regretted the lack of a British tradition of writing about wild land and landscape I have been delighted with the work of Robert Macfarlane. In his book The Wild Places Macfarlane explores the idea of the wild through wild places, large and small, in Britain. Macfarlane walked and slept in his wild places and at times his writing has the same intensity and power as Murray, Fletcher or Abbey. Of a camp on a November walk across Rannoch Moor he writes ‘we stopped there, for dusk was spreading over the Moor, and pitched a small tent. We lay talking in the dusk: about the ground we had covered, the ground still to go, about the odd mixture of apprehension and awe that the Moor provoked in us both. Our sleeping-place was cupped in a curve of the river, on a miniature flood-plain that the winter spates had carved out and flattened: a shelter in the middle of the Moor’s great space’.
Macfarlane ends his book with the important insight for our small, crowded island that wild places don’t have to be vast and that small pockets of wildness exist almost everywhere – ‘there was as much to be learned in an acre of woodland on a city’s fringe as on the shattered summit of Ben Hope’. And that whilst wild places are under ‘multiple and severe threats’, these are temporary in the history of our planet and the wild will return – ‘the ivy will snake back and unrig our flats and terraces’ – an image that reminded me of The Handsome Family’s wonderful song Peace In The Valley Again, which contains the lines:
Empty shelves will swarm with bees,
cash machines will sprout weeds,
lizards will crawl through the parking lot
as birds fly around empty shops.
Somehow I find these sentiments comforting and optimistic, and I am sure that Edward Abbey would agree.
Visionary writers on the wild are important, especially when we are far from wild places, both physically and spiritually. Read these authors, relish their words, turn over their ideas in your mind, let their visions inspire you. But above all go out into the wild and let it envelop you as it did them.
Discovering John Muir
2014 was the centenary of the death of John Muir, arguably the most influential defender of wild places ever and whose legacy is still relevant and important today. Born in Dunbar in Scotland, Muir emigrated to the USA when he was eleven and lived there for the rest of his life. In America he is regarded as the ‘father of National Parks’. The Sierra Club, which he founded in 1892, is one of the USA’s leading conservation organisations and does much to keep his memory alive. Scotland is slowly catching up with John Muir’s Birthplace, a statue of the young Muir and the John Muir Country Park in Dunbar plus the 215 kilometre John Muir Way across the Central Lowlands. And, of course, the John Muir Trust, founded in 1983 to campaign for wild land.
I discovered Muir many years ago, not with a sudden revelation but slowly, as I came across the name every so often. I didn’t really pay him much attention though until I hiked the Pacific Crest Trail and found his name recurring again and again in the High Sierra
From signs and leaflets and talking to other hikers I began to learn a little about the man. A few years later I came across a second-hand copy of The Mountains of California (books by Muir were hard to find in the 1980s) and began to read him in his own words. Immediately I was taken with his passion and devotion to nature. I went on to read his other works, some several times. The language can be flowery for modern tastes but his eye for detail and his love of everything natural shines through. I also read books about Muir, wanting to know more about this iconic figure. I think the best of these is Michael P. Cohen’s The Pathless Way: John Muir and American Wilderness, which goes more deeply into Muir’s dilemmas and contradictions than other biographies.
Muir is to be admired not just as a conservationist, not just for his love of nature, key though these are to his greatness, but also for his outdoor adventures and experiences. Long before any of the equipment we take for granted, or guidebooks, maps and paths, Muir would head off into the wilderness on long solo treks. From a boy scrambling on the cliffs and castle walls of Dunbar to the adult mountaineer making a daring first ascent of remote Mount Ritter in the High Sierra, described superbly in The Mountains of California, he revelled in exploring wild places. He walked long distances as well, A Thousand-Mile Walk To The Gulf describes his journey from Indianapolis to the Gulf of Mexico in 1867. When he arrived in California he walked from San Francisco to Yosemite Valley. There followed many trips into the then little-known Sierra Nevada and in later years further afield, especially Alaska (as told in Travels in Alaska).
He was not just concerned for the conservation of wilderness for its own sake and the sake of the animals and plants that lived there. He was also concerned for the sake of humanity. Not being a conservationist who wanted to exclude people he wanted to share his joy in nature with everyone. He led trips for the Sierra Club and his writing was aimed at encouraging people to visit wild places as well as calling for their protection. He wrote in The Yosemite, ‘Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul alike’ and in Our National Parks, a book intended to encourage visitors to the 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.’
John Muir’s vision of the necessity of wildness and nature is as valid now as it was 100 years ago, maybe more so.
Tracking the spirit of John Muir
‘We are all, in some sense, mountaineers, and going to the mountains is going home.’ John Muir
Muir Station Road. Best Western John Muir Inn. Muir Family Dentistry. Muir Lodge Motel. John Muir Medical Center. John Muir Elementary School. Muir Heritage Land Trust. Muir Station Shopping Center. Spend much time in the small town of Martinez (population 37,000) in western California and it’s hard to avoid the name of John Muir, though the use of it seems to have little to do with the great conservationist.
The reason for the rash of Muir names is because Martinez is where Muir lived for the last 34 years of his life, 24 of them in a rather grand house built by his father-in-law and now the centrepiece of the John Muir National Historic Site. The house gives interesting insights into Muir but there’s not much feel of his presence and what little there is suggests a desire to be elsewhere, in the wilderness. His bedroom lacks curtains, as he wanted to be woken by the rising sun, and a downstairs parlour has a massive fireplace, put in by Muir after the original one was damaged in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, so he could have a ‘real mountain campfire’.
His study is scattered with books and papers and it is easy to imagine him sitting here writing about the mountains and forests, his mind and spirit far away in what he regarded as his true home.
From Martinez I travelled to Yosemite Valley, where he lived from 1868 to 1873, and which lies at the heart of his inspiration and philosophy. ‘Incomparable’, he called it. Whilst the Valley is beautiful and inspiring it’s also a holiday resort, crammed with cars, coaches, campgrounds, cabins, cafes, visitor centres, shops, hotels and hordes of people. The sandy banks of the Merced River look like a seaside beach in summer. Yet somehow the grandeur overcomes all this, the beautiful trees, the magnificent rock walls, the feeling of harmony dominates the works of humankind and makes them seem small and transitory.
It was like this in Muir’s day too, when Yosemite was already a popular tourist destination and he wrote ‘the tide of visitors will float slowly about the bottom of the valley as a harmless scum, collecting in hotel and saloon eddies, leaving the rocks and falls eloquent as ever and instinct with imperishable beauty and greatness’. Walking round the Valley in the evening on quiet trails away from the crowds and looking up at the massive rock face of Half Dome I shared the wonder and inspiration he felt.
Beyond Yosemite Valley lies the vast High Sierra, Muir’s ‘the range of light’ which he spent many years studying and exploring, discovering the evidence that the glorious landscape was created by glaciers and making many first ascents. Now a large swathe of the Sierra bears his name as the John Muir Wilderness and the magnificent John Muir Trail threads a way through the places he loved. There’s a Muir Pass, Muir Gorge, Muir Lake, Muir Grove and Mount Muir too as well as lakes named after his daughters, Wanda and Helen. These names seem appropriate here, unlike those in Martinez. This is the land that inspired Muir and that he knew intimately, describing it in detail in many books and articles. If his spirit is to be found anywhere it is in the Sierra wilderness.
Leaving Yosemite Valley I spent five weeks exploring the High Sierra, without once crossing a road, though I did dip down to remote resorts to resupply. Like Muir I slept out under the stars most nights and appreciated daily why he wrote ‘How glorious a greeting the sun gives the mountains! To behold this alone is worth the pains of any excursion a thousand times over’. I visited the deep trench of King’s Canyon, where Muir gave talks to Sierra Club members, and Giant Forest, named by him for the Giant Sequoias, which he called ‘Nature’s forest masterpieces’. These trees are so massive – the largest living things – that I found it hard to believe in them even while looking at them.
Travelling from the depths of the canyons and forests to the high passes and the mountain summits I found it easy to understand his feeling for this land. His words meant so much more to me once I had walked in his footsteps.
Whilst John Muir’s spirit can be found in the High Sierra it can also be found in wild places everywhere and also, and importantly, wherever people fight for nature and wildness and are prepared to speak out against those whom he described as ‘temple destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism, (who) seem to have a perfect contempt for Nature, and, instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the mountains, lift them to the Almighty Dollar’.
His legacy is found in the John Muir Trust, the Sierra Club and other wilderness conservation organisations as well as in the mountains and forests of the Sierra Nevada. However while continuing John Muir’s campaigns for nature we shouldn’t forget his advice to ‘keep close to Nature’s heart... and break clear away, once in awhile, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean’. Renewing our inspiration is important.
Colin Fletcher: the man who walked through time
‘I stood for a while looking at the mountains and listening to the silence. Then I walked slowly out into the desert that for six hundred miles would be my world’. Colin Fletcher, The Thousand-Mile Summer
Few people in Britain have heard of Colin Fletcher, yet he is in my opinion the finest of all writers on backpacking and wilderness walking. Every time I read the words above a shiver runs through me as I know I am at the start of a literary adventure. Although living in California for half a century Colin Fletcher, who died in June 2007, was British, born in Wales in 1922. Fletcher inspired thousands of American backpackers and an appreciation of his work in Britain is long overdue.
Before reaching California and the start of his writing life Fletcher served in the Royal Marines in World War Two, then farmed and built roads in East Africa before working as a prospector and road builder in Canada. Shortly after moving to California from Canada in 1956 he decided ‘that what I wanted most in life just then was to walk from one end of California to the other … I knew, of course, that the idea was crazy; but I felt almost sure I was going’. And go he did, within a month, on a journey that resulted in his first book, The Thousand-Mile Summer, which captures superbly the nature of wilderness walking and camping.
I have to admit to a bias here as this book changed my life. I first read it in the late 1970s and it had a profound and inspiring effect on me. Fletcher’s descriptions of the deserts and mountains, of walking through real wilderness and camping under the stars started in me a hunger to do the same and resulted in my walking the Pacific Crest Trail and long distance walking becoming my passion and my life.
Many people have written about long walks and backpacking but none have captured the experience so fully, intensely and personally as Colin Fletcher. He walked alone, and indeed shunned the company of others, coming across as quite a curmudgeon in some of his writing, but what he sought was ‘the gigantic, enveloping, including, renewing solitude of wild and silent places’ (The Complete Walker). His books are mostly about nature and his thoughts and feelings rather than about groups or other people. Indeed, he says little about his private life or relationships outside of his journeys. But the reader learns much about his relationship to nature and wilderness. Here he is describing dusk in the California desert after going down to a lagoon to wash:
‘I stood still, waiting for the light to go out over the mountains.
‘But the mountains were not yet ready. A line of golden peaks caught fire. Black canyons gouged their slopes and pierced the iridescent red with deeper hints of hell. The iridescence deepened, the hints broadened. And then – on the very threshold of revelation – the shadow reached out and quietened everything, and the world was only shades of grey.
‘I found myself shivering on the edge of the lagoon, still clutching a cake of soap’. The Thousand-Mile Summer
Colin Fletcher wasn’t bothered about distance or speed. His concern was with experience. Camping was just as important to him as walking and he described many camps with a loving detail that every backpacker will recognise. Perhaps the book that describes this best, along with the intensity of feeling his walking engenders, is The Man Who Walked Through Time, which describes his walk the length of the Grand Canyon, the first time it had been done. Fletcher gives a long description of his first camp on that walk, covering every detail, even down to where he places every item. Here is a sample:
‘I unzippered the mummy bag part way, pushed my feet down into it, pulled the bag up loosely round my waist, and leaned back. It was very comfortable like that, with my butt cushioned on the pillow of the air mattress and my back leaning against the fully inflated main section, which in turn leaned against the now almost empty pack. I sat there for several minutes, content, relaxed, drifting – hovering on the brink of daydreams without ever achieving anything quite so active’.
Doesn’t that just make you want to be out in the wilds sitting there almost daydreaming?
Fletcher’s best known book is The Complete Walker, which has gone through four editions (though the last one with a co-writer. I recommend one of the earlier editions for the full Fletcher approach and the pleasure of his delightful prose). Subtitled ‘the joys and techniques of hiking and backpacking’ this is the most detailed and the most readable guide imaginable. Fletcher covers everything entertainingly and, in places, with humour. It’s a very personal book, describing what he did and what he used, with the idea that others can learn from this. The detailed descriptions of equipment are now out of date but this doesn’t matter. They are only examples and it’s the overall approach to walking and camping that matters. This timelessness is also why The Thousand Mile Summer and The Man Who Walked Through Time are fresh and relevant many decades after they were written.
Throughout his work there is a deep respect and love for nature and a strong desire for it to be protected. He’s not an out and out campaigner like that other great writer of the desert Southwest, Edward Abbey, though The Man Who Walked Through Time does contain a moving epilogue about the threats to dam the Grand Canyon in the 1960s. Fletcher warned that ‘unless we do something, you and I, we may soon find this book has become a requiem for Grand Canyon’. The depth of his feeling is shown when he writes ‘I suggest that we little men have no damned right even to consider such vandalism – for any reason at all’.
The same feelings surface in The Secret Worlds of Colin Fletcher, a collection of essays on different walks. In the chapter entitled ‘Among The Redwoods’ in which he is horrified by the destruction of ancient redwood groves and writes of the logging of old growth forests that it ‘left you ashamed … of belonging to a species that for personal gain waged war on its own planet.’
The four books I’ve referred to above are the key works for walkers interested in Colin Fletcher. Perhaps the most interesting of his other works is River, which tells the story of his trip, mostly by raft, down the length of the Colorado River at the age of 67 in 1989, another first, in which his journey also stands for his journey through life. The book contains one of my favourite Colin Fletcher quotations:
‘I knew, deep and safe, beyond mere intellect, that there is nothing like a wilderness journey for rekindling the fires of life’.
His final two books, The Winds of Mara and The Man From The Cave, are both quite obscure and long out of print. Devotee that I am, I hunted them down in second-hand book shops on visits to the USA long before the Internet made finding such books easy. The Winds of Mara describes a return visit to Kenya on which he camped, with a vehicle, in the bush. He describes well the wildlife and the landscape and his interactions with people but it lacks some of the drive of his wilderness journey books. The Man From The Cave is a real oddity, a fascinating book that tells you more about its author than its subject. Fletcher discovers a cave in a remote part of the Nevada desert with some old possessions that showed someone had once lived there. The book is the story of his research into who the person was and why they were there.
Colin Fletcher writes mainly about the Southwest USA. His heart lies with the Colorado River and the surrounding landscape, but don’t let this put you off reading him. His backpacking tales are about the experience as much or more than the place and thus of interest to all who love walking and camping in the wild, whether the Scottish Highlands or the Grand Canyon. Be warned though the books might just stir a desire in you to go and walk in Fletcher’s country, as they did in me.