|
|
John Muir on Outdoor Living in the Sierra Backcountry
 In the Spring of 1869
a young naturalist was offered a job overseeing a sheep herding operation
in the Sierra Nevadas. This young naturalist, John Muir came to American
from Scotland.
Muir, following a nearly blinding industrial accident, began his 1869
trek as a researcher, writer, and illustrator of natural details, and
finished the journey forever in love with the Sierras. John Muir was the
moving force in founding Yosemite as a National Park, and founded the
Sierra Club.
The Sierra club has an excellent online exhibit about John Muir, and the
Camp thanks them for making Muir’s writings available online.
The following are excerpts about the wonders of outdoor living from his
diary, later published in 1911 as My First Summer in the Sierras.
June 13. --Another glorious Sierra day in which one seems to be dissolved
and absorbed and sent pulsing onward we know not where. Life seems neither
long nor short, 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. Yonder rises another white skyland. How sharply the yellow
pine spires and the palm-like crowns of the sugar pines are outlined on
its smooth white domes. And hark! the grand thunder billows booming, rolling
from ridge to ridge, followed by the faithful shower.
June 14. --The pool-basins below the falls and cascades hereabouts, formed
by the heavy down-plunging currents, are kept nicely clean and clear of
detritus. The heavier parts of the material swept over the falls are heaped
up a short distance in front of the basins in the form of a dam, thus
tending, together with erosion, to increase their size. Sudden changes,
however, are effected during the spring floods, when the snow is melting
and the upper tributaries are roaring loud from "bank to brae." Then boulders
that have fallen into the channels, and which the ordinary summer and
winter currents were unable to move, are suddenly swept forward as by
a mighty besom, hurled over the falls into these pools, and piled up in
a new dam together with part of the old one, while some of the smaller
boulders are carried further down stream and variously lodged according
to size and shape, all seeking rest where the force of the current is
less than the resistance they are able to offer.
But the greatest changes made in these relations of fall, pool, and
dam are caused, not by the ordinary spring floods, but by extraordinary
ones that occur at irregular intervals. The testimony of trees growing
on flood boulder deposits shows that a century or more has passed since
the last master flood came to awaken everything movable to go swirling
and dancing on wonderful journeys. These floods may occur during the summer,
when heavy thunder-showers, called "cloud-bursts," fall on wide, steeply
inclined stream basins furrowed by converging channels, which suddenly
gather the waters together into the main trunk in booming torrents of
enormous transporting power, though short lived.One of these ancient flood
boulders stands firm in the middle of the stream channel, just below the
lower edge of the pool dam at the foot of the fall nearest our camp.
It is a nearly cubical mass of granite about eight feet high, plushed
with mosses over the top and down the sides to ordinary high-water mark.
When I climbed on top of it to-day and lay down to rest, it seemed the
most romantic spot I had yet found, --the one big stone with its mossy
level top and smooth sides standing square and firm and solitary, like
an altar, the fall in front of it bathing it lightly with the finest of
the spray, just enough to keep its moss cover fresh; the clear green pool
beneath, with its foam-bells and its half circle of lilies leaning forward
like a band of admirers, and flowering dogwood and alder trees leaning
over all in sun-sifted arches. How soothingly, restfully cool it is beneath
that leafy, translucent ceiling, and how delightful the water music--the
deep bass tones of the fall, the clashing, ringing spray, and infinite
variety of small low tones of the current gliding past the side of the
boulder-island, and glinting against a thousand smaller stones down the
ferny channel! All this shut in; every one of these influences acting
at short range as if in a quiet room.
The place seemed holy, where one might hope to see God. After dark,
when the camp was at rest, I groped my way back to the altar boulder and
passed the night on it, --above the water, beneath the leaves and stars,
--everything still more impressive than by day, the fall seen dimly white,
singing Nature's old love song with solemn enthusiasm, while the stars
peering through the leaf-roof seemed to join in the white water's song.
Precious night, precious day to abide in me forever. Thanks be to God
for this immortal gift.
 June 16. --One of the Indians from
Brown's Flat got right into the middle of the camp this morning, unobserved.
I was seated on a stone, looking over my notes and sketches, and happening
to look up, was startled to see him standing grim and silent within a
few steps of me, as motionless and weather-stained as an old tree-stump
that had stood there for centuries. All Indians seem to have learned this
wonderful way of walking unseen, --making themselves invisible like certain
spiders I have been observing here, which, in case of alarm, caused, for
example, by a bird alighting on the bush their webs are spread upon, immediately
bounce themselves up and down on their elastic threads so rapidly that
only a blur is visible.
The wild Indian power of escaping observation, even where there is little
or no cover to hide in, was probably slowly acquired in hard hunting and
fighting lessons while trying to approach game, take enemies by surprise,
or get safely away when compelled to retreat. And this experience transmitted
through many generations seems at length to have become what is vaguely
called instinct. How smooth and changeless seems the surface of the mountains
about us! Scarce a track is to be found beyond the range of the sheep
except on small open spots on the sides of the streams, or where the forest
carpets are thin or wanting. On the smoothest of these open strips and
patches deer tracks may be seen, and the great suggestive footprints of
bears, which, with those of the many small animals, are scarce enough
to answer as a kind of light ornamental stitching or embroidery.Along
the main ridges and larger branches of the river Indian trails may be
traced, but they are not nearly as distinct as one would expect to find
them.
How many centuries Indians have roamed these woods nobody knows, probably
a great many, extending far beyond the time that Columbus touched our
shores, and it seems strange that heavier marks have not been made. Indians
walk softly and hurt the landscape hardly more than the birds and squirrels,
and their brush and bark huts last hardly longer than those of wood rats,
while their more enduring monuments, excepting those wrought on the forests
by the fires they made to improve their hunting grounds, vanish in a few
centuries. How different are most of those of the white man, especially
on the lower gold region, --roads blasted in teh solid rock, wild streams
dammed and tamed and turned out of their channels and led along the sides
of cañons and valleys to work in mines like slaves. Crossing from ridge
to ridge, high in the air, on long straddling trestles as if flowing on
stilts, or down and up across valleys and hills, imprisoned in iron pipes
to strike and wash away hills and miles of the skin of the mountain's
face, riddling, stripping every gold gully and flat. These are the white
man's marks made in a few feverish years, to say nothing of mills, fields,
villages, scattered hundreds of miles along the flank of the Range. Long
will it be ere these marks are effaced, though Nature is doing what she
can, replanting, gardening, sweeping away old dams and flumes, leveling
gravel and boulder piles, patiently trying to heal every raw scar. The
main gold storm is over. Calm enough are the gray old miners scratching
a bare living in waste diggings here and there.
Thundering underground blasting is still going on to feed the pounding
quartz mills, but their influence on the landscape is light as compared
with that of the pick-and-shovel storms waged a few years ago. Fortunately
for Sierra scenery the gold-bearing slates are mostly restricted to the
foothills. The region about our camp is still wild, and higher lies the
snow about as trackless as the sky. Only a few hills and domes of cloudland
were built yesterday and none at all to-day. The light is peculiarly white
and thin, though pleasantly warm. The serenity of this mountain weather
in the spring, just when Nature's pulses are beating highest, is one of
its greatest charms.
 June 23. --Oh, these vast,
calm, measureless mountain days, inciting at once to work and rest! Days
in whose light everything seems equally divine, opening a thousand windows
to show us God. Nevermore, however weary, should one faint by the way
who gains the blessings of one mountain day; whatever his fate, long life,
short life, stormy or calm, he is rich forever.
From My First Summer in the Sierras – Chapter II. A Camp along the North
Fork of the Merced, by John Muir, first published in 1911
|