STEEP TRAILS: Adventure Memoirs, Travel Sketches, Nature Essays & Wilderness Studies. John Muir

       John Muir

      STEEP TRAILS: Adventure Memoirs, Travel Sketches, Nature Essays & Wilderness Studies

       California - Utah - Nevada - Washington - Oregon - The Grand Canyon

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       [email protected] 2017 OK Publishing ISBN 978-80-7583-813-1

      Table of Contents

       EDITOR'S NOTE

       I. WILD WOOL

       II. A Geologist's Winter Walk

       III. Summer Days at Mount Shasta

       IV. A Perilous Night on Shasta's Summit

       V. Shasta Rambles and Modoc Memories

       VI. The City of the Saints

       VII. A Great Storm in Utah

       VIII. Bathing in Salt Lake

       IX. Mormon Lilies

       X. The San Gabriel Valley

       XI. The San Gabriel Mountains

       XII. Nevada Farms

       XIII. Nevada Forests

       XIV. Nevada's Timber Belt

       XV. Glacial Phenomena in Nevada

       XVI. Nevada's Dead Towns

       XVII. Puget Sound

       XVIII. The Forests of Washington

       XIX. People and Towns of Puget Sound

       XX. An Ascent of Mount Rainier

       XXI. The Physical and Climatic Characteristics of Oregon

       XXII. The Forests of Oregon and their Inhabitants

       XXIII. The Rivers of Oregon

       XXIV. The Grand Canyon of the Colorado

      EDITOR'S NOTE

       Table of Contents

      The papers brought together in this volume have, in a general way, been arranged in chronological sequence. They span a period of twenty-nine years of Muir's life, during which they appeared as letters and articles, for the most part in publications of limited and local circulation. The Utah and Nevada sketches, and the two San Gabriel papers, were contributed, in the form of letters, to the San Francisco Evening Bulletin toward the end of the seventies. Written in the field, they preserve the freshness of the author's first impressions of those regions. Much of the material in the chapters on Mount Shasta first took similar shape in 1874. Subsequently it was rewritten and much expanded for inclusion in Picturesque California, and the Region West of the Rocky Mountains, which Muir began to edit in 1888. In the same work appeared the description of Washington and Oregon. The charming little essay "Wild Wool" was written for the Overland Monthly in 1875. "A Geologist's Winter Walk" is an extract from a letter to a friend, who, appreciating its fine literary quality, took the responsibility of sending it to the Overland Monthly without the author's knowledge. The concluding chapter on "The Grand Canyon of the Colorado" was published in the Century Magazine in 1902, and exhibits Muir's powers of description at their maturity.

      Some of these papers were revised by the author during the later years of his life, and these revisions are a part of the form in which they now appear. The chapters on Mount Shasta, Oregon, and Washington will be found to contain occasional sentences and a few paragraphs that were included, more or less verbatim, in The Mountains of California and Our National Parks. Being an important part of their present context, these paragraphs could not be omitted without impairing the unity of the author's descriptions.

      The editor feels confident that this volume will meet, in every way, the high expectations of Muir's readers. The recital of his experiences during a stormy night on the summit of Mount Shasta will take rank among the most thrilling of his records of adventure. His observations on the dead towns of Nevada, and on the Indians gathering their harvest of pine nuts, recall a phase of Western life that has left few traces in American literature. Many, too, will read with pensive interest the author's glowing description of what was one time called the New Northwest. Almost inconceivably great have been the changes wrought in that region during the past generation. Henceforth the landscapes that Muir saw there will live in good part only in his writings, for fire, axe, plough, and gunpowder have made away with the supposedly boundless forest wildernesses and their teeming life.

      William Frederic Bade

       Berkeley, California

       May, 1918

      I. WILD WOOL

       Table of Contents

      Moral improvers have calls to preach. I have a friend who has a call to plough, and woe to the daisy sod or azalea thicket that falls under the savage redemption of his keen steel shares. Not content with the so-called subjugation of every terrestrial bog, rock, and moorland, he would fain discover some method of reclamation applicable to the ocean and the sky, that in due calendar time they might be brought to bud and blossom as the rose. Our efforts are of no avail when we seek to turn his attention to wild roses, or to the fact that both ocean and sky are already about as rosy as possible—the one with stars, the other with dulse, and foam, and wild light. The practical developments