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
Tourists that spend their money to see rocks and falls are fools,” a shepherd told John Muir in 1869 during Muir’s fabled First Summer in the Sierra.
Since I like rocks and waterfalls, and have often been called a fool, I don’t believe such a statement. I can’t help but wonder though what John Muir would think about our national parks today. Not so much the parks, but the tourists. I pull off the road to let some malcontent speed by me.
“Hey, pal!” I mutter under my breath while saluting him with a finger. “This is Yosemite National Park—not the 405 in LA!”
I’m following the trail of John Muir (1838-1914), the “Father of our National Parks,” the “Wilderness Prophet,” the “Citizen of the Universe,” the “Magnificent Tramp,” America’s foremost naturalist, preservationist and conservationist, or, as he described himself: “poetico-trampo-geologist-botanist and ornithologist-naturalist, etc. etc.”
The Natural
Born in Scotland, Muir came to America in 1849 when his family started a farm in Wisconsin. Muir likely would have been lost to history as a victim of the industrial revolution, an inventor and clockmaker, if not for a factory accident on March 6, 1867, that almost cost him his right eye. As he recovered, he did some serious soul-searching. “I might have become a millionaire,” he said, “but I chose to become a tramp.” For this, America is eternally grateful.
His trampings would take him across the continent, walking to the Gulf of Mexico, traipsing across California’s High Sierra and canoeing into Alaska’s Glacier Bay. At Yellowstone, the Great Basin, the Petrified Forest, Mount Rainier and many other places in the wild, Muir would leave his mark, and in many cases his name, on some of the most breathtaking places America has to offer.
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