John muir first summer in the sierra6/9/2023 ![]() ![]() "Yosemite Valley was the ultimate pilgrimage site for Victorian Americans," Gisel said. Leading me through the forest was Bonnie Gisel, curator of the Sierra Club's LeConte Memorial Lodge and the author of several books on Muir. No wonder many 19th-century travelers who visited Yosemite saw it as a new Eden. And every turn offered picture-postcard views of the valley's soaring granite cliffs, so majestic that early visitors compared them to the walls of Gothic cathedrals. ![]() The crisp summer morning that I was guided to the site, the mountain air was perfumed with ponderosa and cedar jays, larks and ground squirrels gamboled about. Maybe that's not such a bad thing, for here one can experience the Yosemite that inspired Muir. But only park historians and a few Muir devotees even know where the little log cabin was, just yards from the Yosemite Falls Trail. ![]() ![]() The naturalist John Muir is so closely associated with Yosemite National Park-after all, he helped draw up its proposed boundaries in 1889, wrote the magazine articles that led to its creation in 1890 and co-founded the Sierra Club in 1892 to protect it-that you'd think his first shelter there would be well marked. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |