The John Muir Trail. Alan Castle

      One of the numerous mountain tarns below Silver Pass (Day 9)

      Through his writings and eccentric lifestyle Muir became widely known throughout the United States. He was an influential figure who received the rich and famous to his simple Californian home, including the poet and essayist Ralph Emerson, the author and naturalist H.D. Thoreau and the eminent geologist Joseph Le Conte (see Le Conte Canyon, Day 14 of the JMT). Muir was a confidant of congressmen, presidents and other influential people, and in this way was able to persuade the most powerful men in the country of the urgent need to protect the wilderness areas of western America from commercial exploitation. He pushed for the establishment of Yosemite as the first national park in 1890. In 1903 Muir encouraged President Roosevelt to spend several nights camping out in Yosemite with him, during which time they agreed on a programme of conservation for the area.

      Muir was also instrumental in the fight to set up Sequoia, Grand Canyon and other national parks for reasons of conservation and access, and is today dubbed the founding father of America’s national park system. The debate over national parks was really a debate about exploitation versus conservation. In a land where capitalism and the work ethic reign supreme it is perhaps surprising that Muir’s views won the day and that the national parks in America were established to protect and conserve the great wildernesses so early on in the country’s history.

      John Muir was undoubtedly America’s most famous and influential naturalist and conservationist, but he was also a popular writer whose somewhat romantic style and unbounded love of nature often won over the hearts even of those with little interest in nature and the environment. His eight wilderness books, a lifetime’s work, are classics of the genre: The Story of my Boyhood and Youth, A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf, My First Summer in the Sierra, The Mountains of California, Our National Parks, The Yosemite, Travels in Alaska and Steep Trails. They were republished in Britain by Diadem in one volume in 1992 (see Appendix 7 – Bibliography). In all he wrote over 300 articles and 10 major books.

      Sadly Muir lost his last fight, a long, drawn-out campaign to save the Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite from being flooded. This failure dispirited him and soon after, on Christmas Eve 1914, he died of pneumonia.

      His lasting memorials are the world’s national park networks established by those inspired by his vision. His views are perhaps even more relevant today because of the many threats that the modern world poses for the wild places of this fragile planet. In essence Muir’s naturalist philosophy was a simple one, believing that man truly belonged to nature. ‘I only went out for a walk,’ he wrote, ‘and finally decided to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.’

      In Memory of John Muir

      In Britain the memory of John Muir, the principles by which he lived and his life’s work in saving and conserving wild areas of the world are embodied in the John Muir Trust, a charity founded in 1983. The aims of the trust are simple: to save and conserve wild places. At the time of writing the it owns and manages seven outstanding wild areas, totalling over 20,000 hectares in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, including Britain’s highest mountain, Ben Nevis. The trust is a membership organisation open to all who have an interest in wild places. A regular journal keeps members informed of activities and plans for the future. Further details of the trust can be found on their website at www.johnmuirtrust.org (see Appendix 6).