John Muir

At Church with John Muir

August 2014. The wind across Tuolumne Meadows was stronger and cooler than we had expected for mid-August as we parked at the trailhead and started on the John Muir Trail for Cathedral Peak. In My First Summer in the Sierra,
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All I Came To Seek I’ve Found: Closing the Loop with John Muir in California

August 2014. Waiting in Buenos Aires for a ship that would take him to Africa, the second leg of the last major journey of his life, John Muir wrote to his friend Henry Fairfield Osborn in late November, 1911: “All
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Picnicking in Deep Time

Leaning against a big old log while eating lunch, I felt vaguely uneasy. It reminded me of a big driftwood log I’ve sat by on a beach in Oregon, except this log was solid rock. I was in the Petrified
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Following John Muir’s Footsteps in the Petrified Forest

October 30, 2013. Just after the death of his wife Louie Strenzel Muir in August, 1905, seeking to escape his grief and find relief for his youngest daughter Helen’s tuberculosis, John Muir travelled with his daughters to eastern Arizona. They settled
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Following Muir’s Route in Sketches and Photos

February 2013. Marcelo Mila, the Mapuche leader of the group now living at the old Smith fundo of Ontario, first took us to see the view to the southeast, over the gentle valley of the Río Quino.  The view matched
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Maples, Mapuches, and Monkey Puzzles: Human Dimensions of John Muir’s Travels in Chile

February 2013. Few people are aware that John Muir, a founding father of American conservation, travelled alone to Chile in 1911 at the age of 73 because he wanted to see the Monkey Puzzle Tree, Araucaria araucana, in its native forests.
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Tracking John Muir to the Monkey Puzzle Forests of Chile

Few people know that John Muir – nature writer, champion of Yosemite, and a founding father of the American environmental movement and of our system of national parks – traveled to South America in 1911, alone at the age of
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Yosemite National Park: John Muir and Conservation Philosophy, Monitoring Glaciers, and Payments for Ecosystem Services

October 1, 2011 In late September I made an Indian summer pilgrimage to the “Range of Light,” as John Muir called the Sierra Nevada. In My First Summer in the Sierra, published in 1911, Muir wrote: “When we try to
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