Wed Jan 01, 2014 at 07:15 PM PST
John Muir and his beloved Yosemite ... in winter
"One day's exposure to mountains is better than
cartloads of books. See how willingly Nature poses herself upon
photographers' plates. No earthly chemicals are so sensitive as those of
the human soul."
Yosemite Park is a place of rest, a refuge from the roar and dust and weary, nervous, wasting work of the lowlands, in which one gains the advantages of both solitude and society. Nowhere will you find more company of a soothing peace-be-still kind. Your animal fellow beings, so seldom regarded in civilization, and every rock-brow and mountain, stream, and lake, and every plant soon come to be regarded as brothers; even one learns to like the storms and clouds and tireless winds. This one noble park is big enough and rich enough for a whole life of study and aesthetic enjoyment. It is good for everybody, no matter how benumbed with care, encrusted with a mail of business habits like a tree with bark. None can escape its charms. Its natural beauty cleans and warms like a fire, and you will be willing to stay forever in one place like a tree. —John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir
"Going to the mountains is going home."
Born in Scotland in 1838, Muir immigrated to Wisconsin with his family when he was 11 years old.... Muir first visited Yosemite in 1868....
In 1889, Muir took Robert Underwood Johnson, editor of Century Magazine, to Tuolumne Meadows so he could see how sheep were damaging the land. Muir convinced Johnson that the area could only be saved if it was incorporated into a national park. Johnson’s publication of Muir’s exposés sparked a bill in the U.S. Congress that proposed creating a new federally administered park surrounding the old Yosemite Grant. Yosemite National Park became a reality in 1890....
The last 25 years of Muir’s life were consumed with constant travel, writing, and oversight of the Sierra Club—for which he served as president from its creation in 1892.
—National Park Service
"The battle we have fought, and are still
fighting for the forests is a part of the eternal conflict between right
and wrong, and we cannot expect to see the end of it. ... So we must
count on watching and
striving for these trees, and should always be glad to find anything so surely good and noble to strive for."
striving for these trees, and should always be glad to find anything so surely good and noble to strive for."
"If one pine were placed in a town square, what
admiration it would excite! Yet who is conscious of the pine-tree
multitudes in the free woods, though open to everybody?"
"The snow is melting into music."
"There is not a 'fragment' in all nature, for every relative fragment of one thing is a full harmonious unit in itself."
"Keep close to Nature's heart... and break clear
away, once in a while, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the
woods. Wash your spirit clean."
"God never made an ugly landscape. All that the sun shines on is beautiful, so long as it is wild."
"One touch of nature makes all the world kin."
"In God's wildness lies the hope of the world -
the great fresh unblighted, unredeemed wilderness. The galling harness
of civilization drops off, and wounds heal ere we are aware."
"Only by going alone in silence, without baggage,
can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness. All other travel is
mere dust and hotels and baggage and chatter."
"Most people are on the world, not in it—have no
conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them—undiffused,
separate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching but
separate."
"The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness."
[You can read more about Yosemite and its history at the National Park Service website. The captions above, all taken from the writings of John Muir, can be found at the Sierra Club website. There are many wonderful photographers on Flickr who have shared their work that features the park and other gorgeous natural landscapes. Please check out the images provided by Frozen Coffee, Vishnu V, martapiqs, Dave R, Loyd Schutte, Justin Ennis, Jim Bahn and David (randomcuriosity)].
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