Remembering John Muir, 100 years on
ON this day, the centenary of the death of John Muir, I thought I'd take an extract from a book I wrote a number of years ago, as a kind of celebration of the great Scots born environmentalist.
The extract is from a chapter about a backpacking trip I enjoyed in the Yosemite National Park and it describes an incident which I think clearly shows the kind of character Muir was. I hope you enjoy it...
I leave the trailhead and for three hours climb the steep trail below a soaring ocean of vertical granite. Spray from cascading waterfalls keeps me cool and despite the weight of my pack there is a reassuring familiarity in the creak of the harness as it hugs me around the waist. Part of me wants to rush, to push on with emphasised strides in an effort to reach the top but the sensible side of my brain tells me to cool it, that there's no rush, no timetable, no strict schedule to keep. Once again I have to relearn the luxury of freedom.
There are over 135 switchbacks to be negotiated before the angle of the trail eases off near the top of Yosemite Falls, but despite the steep gradient and the heat of the morning it’s a delightful ascent beneath shady gold-cup oaks and the occasional Douglas fir. Every so often I get a glimpse down into the valley below and it’s like watching a movie. The cars, the buses and the tourist attractions of Yosemite Valley are not part of my world any more, they’ve been left behind for a softer, gentler world, a world in which time has very little meaning
Eventually the trail climbs up through a long, steep trough in the cliffs to emerge into an open forest of Jeffrey pines and white firs. The scent of sun-warmed resin fills my nostrils and I stop for a drink from the creek. The water is clear and refreshingly cold. Some day hikers pass by, out on a climb from the valley. Invariably there is a pleasant, but brief chat. The brevity invariably comes from me. Never rude or intentionally unpleasant, I just want to reach the point were I can connect, and sustained conversations with others can create a barrier to that connection. Most folk understand and are usually too breathless to get into a conversation anyway, but a German lady is keen to chat, recognising my accent. She wants to tell me the full and unexpurgated account of her family holiday a few years back when she went to Loch Ness to try and see the legendary monster. Fortunately her daughter senses my mild impatience so I take the opportunity to remove myself as naturally and as quickly as possible.
The trail climbs briefly again, out of the creek’s gully to follow a crest that parallels the edge of the cliffs. Soon, it slowly drops down to the clear waters of Yosemite Creek where white granite slabs slope down to the lip of Upper Yosemite Falls. The stream flows gently over the smooth slabs before suddenly gathering itself to plunge over the lip of this sheer cliff to become the 1430-ft Yosemite Falls, one of the longest waterfalls in the world.
Incredibly it was here, in 1869 that John Muir, the wilderness prophet and the father of National Parks “connected” with this Yosemite landscape in such a transcendant fashion that “one’s body seems to go where it likes with a will over which we seem to have scarce any control.”
There is a fascinating study to be done on John Muir’s apparent fearlessness. Generally recognised as the finest mountaineer of his time he appeared, time and time again, to take unnecessary risks and yet, as writer and Muir enthusiast Terry Gifford has pointed out, “Through a discipline of tuning in to wildness, Muir could take risks and trust his judgement of the conditions.”
This ability to ‘tune in to wildness’ was a vital constituent in Muir’s character, and while he was not unfamiliar with fear, he did write: “I think that most of the antipathies which haunt and terrify us are morbid productions of ignorance and weakness.”
It seems that John Muir had developed the ability to overcome fear and harness the energies of what most of us recognise as a negative sensation and turn them into something positive, just as an athlete will recognise nervousness as a positive flow of adrenaline. Here, on the very lip of Yosemite Falls, Muir overcame his terror to perform an act that can only be described by sane and rational people as suicidal madness.
Intoxicated by his first views of Yosemite Valley from above, he decided what he really wanted to experience was a view of the falls as they tumbled over the edge. “I approached Yosemite Creek,” he later wrote, ”admiring its easy, graceful, confident gestures as it comes bravely forward in its narrow channel, singing the last of its mountain songs on its way to its fate.” He wanted to “lean out far enough to see the forms and behaviour of the fall all the way down to the bottom.”
Suspecting all he had to do was peer over the edge where the sloping granite apron would terminate with the perpendicular wall of the valley, he discovered that below what appeared to be the edge there was another small brow over which he could not see. Undeterred, he examined the brow and noticed a narrow ledge, about three inches wide, on the very brink, “just wide enough for a rest for one’s heels.”
Nervously, he tried to reach it, making use of the edge of a rock flake for support but to reach the rock flake he had to shuffle down a smooth and steep slope close beside the torrent. He decided not to venture any further, but then changed his mind. Finding tufts of artemisia growing in a crevice he stuffed the bitter leaves in his mouth, “hoping they might prevent giddiness.”
Then, with uncharacteristic but not wholly surprising caution, he crept down to the tiny ledge and managed to shuffle along it for some twenty or thirty feet until he was close to the outplunging cataract.
“Here I obtained a perfectly free view down into the heart of the snowy, chanting throng of comet-like streamers, into which the body of the fall soon separates. While perched on that narrow niche I was not distinctly conscious of danger. The tremendous grandeur of the fall in form and sound and motion, acting at close range, smothered the sense of fear, and in such places one’s body takes keen care for safety on its own account. How long I remained down there, or how I returned, I can hardly tell… My first view of the High Sierra, first view looking down into Yosemite, the death song of Yosemite Creek, and its flight over the vast cliff, each one of these is of itself for a great lifelong landscape fortune – a most memorable day of days – enjoyment enough to kill if that were possible.”
As I stand and watch the swirling waters of Yosemite Creek prepare to launch themselves into the abyss below I am horrified at the thought of trying to emulate Muir’s actions. But even as I recognise my own fears and extreme reluctance to follow in Muir’s footsteps, I detect in his excitement something of the inexorable urge to explore such danger, to infuse one’s senses with the sensations of exposure to such risk, and come out of it triumphant and richer for the experience.
Taken from The Wilderness World of Cameron McNeish. Published by The InPinn, 2001
