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
Climb Every Mountain
Muir didn’t just enjoy California’s natural wonders. In 1888, he set out with artist William Keith to climb Washington’s Mount Rainier—all 14,410 feet of it—on one “fine sunny day, with glorious views of Rainier.”
I’m jealous. It took me three trips to Seattle before I ever saw Mount Rainier. The other times, I spied nothing but
rain clouds.
To Muir, and most tourists, the Cascade Range is as impressive as the Sierra, bringing in approximately two million visitors each year, many of whom don’t drive like malcontents.
“Every leaf seems to speak,” Muir wrote. “One gets close to nature, and the love of beauty grows as it cannot in the distractions of a camp.”
Mount Rainier was designated a national park in 1899.
Old and Faithful
Muir was a fan of Yellowstone National Park, which he visited in 1885, some 13 years after it had been designated as America’s first national park. “Unnumbered lakes shine in it,” he wrote, “united by a famous band of streams that rush up out of hot lava beds, or fall from the frosty peaks in channels rocky and bare, mossy and bosky, to the main rivers, singing cheerily on through every difficulty, cunningly dividing and finding their way east and west to the far-off seas.”
The thing I like most about Yellowstone—well, I mean, next to the wolves and the bears and the bison and John Colter stories and Nez Perce stories and Old Faithful and the great falls and the moose and the trout—is the fact that no one drives like a malcontent. They hardly drive at all, pulling off road after road after road to watch the wildlife.
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