Tramping Through Our National Parks With John Muir
From Yosemite Valley to Los Angeles, California.
Categories: Renegade Roads
By: Johnny D. Boggs 06/01/2008
A friend of mine takes Muir’s writings with him whenever he hikes in Yosemite’s back country, so I’ve likewise armed myself for this road trip. A mighty good idea, because Cathedral Peak does display “Nature’s best masonry and sermons in stones,” the canyon cliffs are “majestic” and California might still be “the floweriest part of the continent.” Yosemite is a garden—almost 1,200 square miles—of meadows and waterfalls, valleys and sequoias.
It was here at Glacier Point, a park ranger jokes on an early evening tour, that two American presidents were caught sleeping together. In a tent, of course. They were Teddy Roosevelt, president of the U.S. of A., and John Muir, president of the Sierra Club, which Muir founded in 1892 (see p. 8).
Teddy described Yosemite as “bully.”
Big Trees, Deep Canyon
Muir also found refuge and wonder among the giant sequoias in the Southern Sierra, where he first visited in 1873, exploring the vast groves of “big trees” and the stunning vistas of Kings Canyon.
Buffalo soldiers of the Ninth Cavalry, under command of Capt. Charles Young, completed the first road into Sequoia National Park’s “Giant Forest” in 1903.
When loggers threatened the survival of the “big trees,” Muir noted mankind would “sell the rain clouds and the snow and the rivers to be cut up and carried away, if that were possible.”
Originally set aside as General Grant National Park in 1890—today covering a small portion of what is now Kings Canyon National Park—Kings Canyon and Sequoia National Parks comprise 863,700 breathtaking acres, much of that being back-country wilderness.
“Every tree of all the mighty host seemed perfect in beauty and strength,” wrote Muir, “and their majestic domed heads, rising above one another on the mountain slope, were most imposingly displayed, like a range of bossy upswelling cumulus clouds on a calm sky.”
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