is a membership organisation open to all who have an interest in wild places. A regular journal keeps members informed of activities and plans for the future. Further details of the trust can be found on their website at www.johnmuirtrust.org (see Appendix 6).
On the JMT in Yosemite en route to Nevada Falls (Day 1)
Efforts have also been made during recent years to raise the profile of John Muir in his native Scotland. The John Muir Birthplace Trust was founded in September 1998 as a partnership project involving East Lothian Council, the John Muir Trust, Dunbar’s John Muir Association and Dunbar Community Council. The aim of the trust is to secure the future of John Muir’s birthplace in Dunbar and an interpretative centre, focused on Muir’s work, was opened there in 2003. It is now visited by thousands of tourists from all over the world, and provides projects for hundreds of local schoolchildren.
Also in memory of John Muir, East Lothian Council has completed a new long distance path in South-East Scotland, opened in September 2007. The John Muir Way (not Trail!) runs for 45 miles, from Cockburnspath (eastern end of the Southern Upland Way) via Dunbar to the edge of Edinburgh, part of the ultra-long North Sea Coastal Trail. The Way, of course, offers a very different experience to the Trail, but is nevertheless a fitting memorial on this side of the Atlantic, to the founding father of the world wide National Park movement.
Parks along the JMT
The John Muir Trail passes through three of North America’s finest and best-known national parks.
Yosemite is known the world over for its high, spectacular mountains and for some of the most stunning, high and technically difficult rock faces anywhere on earth. Few outdoor people will not know of Half Dome and El Capitan, the latter a huge rock monolith (the largest single granite rock on earth) towering above Yosemite Valley and very popular with the world’s top climbers. Yosemite is a natural wonderland of high mountains, granite cliffs, waterfalls, alpine lakes, tarns and streams. Two of the world’s ten highest waterfalls are found in the park, Upper Yosemite and Ribbon Falls.
Situated in the High Sierras of central California, Yosemite was one of America’s first National Parks (Yellowstone was the first in 1872). It was in fact the first area of the States to be given special protection by an act of Congress in 1864, but was not officially designated a national park until 1st October 1890, due largely to the work and sterling efforts of Muir, President Theodore Roosevelt and other influential figures..
Almost 95% of the 750,000 acre park is unspoilt wilderness. Today it is one of America’s most visited national parks, with over 4 million visitors annually. Most, however, visit only the visitor centre, shops, cafés, restaurants and other amenities of Yosemite Valley, whilst the more adventurous do a day-hike or two from Yosemite Valley or Tuolumne Meadows. For those with a head for heights the ascent of Half Dome is a very popular day-hike from Yosemite Valley. But only a tiny percentage of Yosemite’s visitors venture deep into its wilderness. You are to be one of these most fortunate people who will cross the wilderness of Yosemite, experiencing this most awe-inspiring of mountain landscapes.
Today Kings Canyon and Sequoia national parks in the southern Sierra share a boundary and are administered as one park. However, they were set up by separate acts of Congress at different times, and a little of their history will help to make clear their importance. In the mid-18th century this land was seen as ripe for commercial exploitation and attracted timber barons who came to fell the mighty and ancient trees that grew here. But such enlightened and influential people as John Muir worked hard to obtain protection for this special wilderness area.
In 1890, very soon after the creation of Yosemite National Park, the second US national park was established, the relatively small Sequoia National Park, 50,000 acres of protected land. Just a week later a third but very tiny national park (2500 acres) was designated as the General Grant National Park (named after the American general and 18th president of the US, who had died five years earlier in 1885). At the same time more land was added to Sequoia National Park, tripling its size. The continuing efforts of conservationists over the years led to further expansion of the two parks, until in 1940 General Grant National Park took in land around the South Fork Kings river and changed its name to Kings Canyon National Park. As late as 1965 Cedar Grove and Tehipite Valley were added to the park.
The combined Kings Canyon and Sequoia national parks amount to over 1300 square miles of mountain and forest wilderness. The elevation range is from as low as 1500ft in the low foothills of the west of the parks to the high mountains of the Great Western Divide and High Sierras in the east. The highest point in continental America (or the contiguous states), the 14,496ft-high Mount Whitney, lies on the border of Sequoia National Park.
By far the majority of the park lies within the Sequoia and Kings Canyon Wilderness Area; so, as in Yosemite, few of the 2 million annual visitors to the parks reach the heartland of this stunning area. The parks are famous for their Sequoias, the world’s largest trees. The best examples are to be found in the north of the parks area, in the Giant Forest plateau. Here can be found the tallest of the Sequoias, the 275ft-high ‘General Sherman’, whose trunk has a ground-level circumference of 103ft and which weighs an estimated 1385 tons.
John Muir Wilderness
In honour and recognition of the life’s work of America’s best-known conservationist and father of the national parks a large tract of land in California has been designated the John Muir Wilderness.
Located in the Inyo and Sierra national forests, the 581,000-acre John Muir Wilderness is the largest wilderness area in California. Some of the most spectacular mountain scenery on earth is to be seen there, and it is perhaps not surprising that it is the most visited wilderness in the state of California. This unspoilt backcountry is characterised by mile after mile of high snow-capped mountain ranges, countless sparkling alpine lakes, tarns, waterfalls, rivers and streams flowing with crystal-clear pure waters, and vast stretches of native forest. This is all high country, with elevation ranging between 4000 and 14,000ft.
Both the John Muir Trail and the Pacific Crest Trail pass through this wilderness. The JMT first enters the John Muir Wilderness at Red Cones on Day 7 of the trek, leaving on Day 12 when Kings Canyon National Park is entered, soon after leaving Muir Trail Ranch. The very last stages of the hike, Days 20 and 21, from Trail Crest down to Whitney Portal, also cross the John Muir Wilderness.
View of the summit crags on Mount Whitney (Day 20)
Ansel Adams and the Ansel Adams Wilderness
The John Muir Trail passes through an area known as the Ansel Adams Wilderness (on Days 5, 6 and 7, from the Donohue Pass, where the Trail leaves the Yosemite National Park, to Red Cones south of Reds Meadow, where the JMT enters the John Muir Wilderness).
Ansel Adams (1902–1984) was one of America’s foremost landscape photographers and conservationists. Born in San Francisco at the beginning of the 20th century, Ansel Adams rejected a conventional formal education, but showed an early interest in nature and the Californian wilderness after a boyhood trip with his family to Yosemite in 1916, just two years after John Muir’s death.
Adams’s early inclination was to become a pianist, but his interest in photography deepened, and by the late 1920s he was beginning to be recognised as a landscape photographer of outstanding talent. He is particularly well known for his photographs of the national parks of western US. He used his photographs to further his work on conservation, persuading politicians that the great wilderness areas of the US were worth protecting. He served on the board of
