John Muir

Camping with Darwin’s Fox: Nahuelbuta National Park, Chile

April 2016. We arrived late in the afternoon after a drive up and over steep and sometimes rough gravel roads into the Chilean coastal range west of Angol. The road wound into the hills, covered almost completely with tree plantations of
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John Muir Slept Here, and the Mystery of the Missing Monkey Puzzle Pictures

April 2016. In his journal entry for November 20th, 1911, John Muir wrote: “Foggy morn 6 o clock packing for the lofty ridges where grows Araucaria imbricata.” He had arrived in Victoria, Chile, on November 14th, and after being delayed for
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Following Up on Following John Muir to the Monkey Puzzle Forests of Chile

April 2016. I’ve written several stories before about two previous trips to Chile with my son Jonathan, during which we reconstructed the route taken by John Muir in 1911 in his little-known quest to see forests of Araucaria araucana, the monkey
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The View from El Cañi

April 2016. It was a glorious, crisp, sunny fall Sunday when we turned into the small parking lot at the trailhead of the Sanctuario El Cañi in the village of Pichares, about 20 kilometers east of Pucón, Chile. Pucón is a
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Travels in Alaska: Seeking the Sublime Among Glaciers and Fjords

September 2015. All but one of the 40 glaciers that flow from the Harding Icefield, which caps the Kenai Mountains on Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula, spill into a handful of fjords that connect with Resurrection Bay and the Gulf of Alaska. I
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Laudato Si’: The Pope’s Encyclical on Care for Our Common Home

September 2015. Pope Francis’s visit to Washington, DC, this week motivated me to speed up my reading of his lengthy and weighty encyclical on climate change, ecology, and humans and nature, “Laudato Si’: On Care for our Common Home.” The document
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In Search of the Sublime with Albert Bierstadt in Colorado

July 2015. The word “sublime” isn’t used much these days, but it would have been 150 years ago. America’s westward expansion, and the Civil War, embedded in the context of global exploration and a rapid expansion of science, were challenging the
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An Afternoon at Slabsides with John o’ the Birds

May 2015. When I checked John Burroughs’s first book of nature essays, Wake-Robin, out of the Stanford Library where I was an undergraduate, I wrote him off as an eastern nature wimp. My hero was John Muir, who described climbing to
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Lunch at Grey Towers

From the terrace in front of the mansion, with its stone towers and steep roofs of shiny grey local slate, the lawn sloped steeply down toward the town of Milford, Pennsylvania, and gave a long view east over the Delaware
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Dreaming of Whales in the Desert

April 2015. Winter has lingered on and on here near Washington, DC, and spring has been slow and reluctant. The National Cherry Blossom Festival is scheduled to end before the cherry blossoms even reach their peak bloom this year. And
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