recorded in his journal one August evening during his first summer in the Sierra, “The Forests…and lakes and meadows and glad-singing streams.… I should like to dwell with them forever…a new heaven and earth every day.… Creation just beginning.… ”4
Arriving in the Enchanting World of the Sierra Nevada
JOHN MUIR WAS TO DRAW many times on this image of his first sight of the Sierra Nevada. It was a view that shaped his thinking and sustained him all his days to come. Of his three-month walk from San Francisco to this point, Muir wrote, “I followed the Diablo foothills along the San Jose Valley to Gilroy, thence over the Diablo Mountains to the Valley of the San Joaquin by the Pacheco Pass, thence down the valley opposite the mouth of the Merced River, thence across to San Joaquin, and up into the Sierra Nevada to the mammoth trees of Mariposa and the glorious Yosemite, thence down the Merced to this place.” The curtain was raised!
The air was perfectly delicious, sweet enough for the breath of angels; every draught of it gave a separate and distinct piece of pleasure. I do not believe that Adam and Eve ever tasted better in their balmiest nook.
The last of the Coast Range foothills were in near view all the way to Gilroy. Their union with the Valley is by curves and slopes of inimitable beauty, and they were robed with the greenest grass and richest light I ever beheld, and colored and shaded with millions of flowers of every hue, chiefly of purple and golden yellow; and hundreds of crystal rills joined songs with the larks, filling all the Valley with music like a sea, making it an Eden from end to end.
The scenery, too, and all of Nature in the pass is fairly enchanting, strange and beautiful mountain ferns, low in the dark canyons and high upon the rocky, sunlit peaks, banks of blooming shrubs, and sprinklings and gatherings of flowers, precious and pure as ever enjoyed the sweets of a mountain home. And oh, what streams are there beaming, glancing, each with music of its own, singing as they go in the shadow and light, onward upon their lovely changing pathways to the sea; and hills rise over hills, and mountains over mountains, heaving, waving, swelling, in most glorious, overpowering, unreadable majesty; and when at last, stricken with faint like a crushed insect, you hope to escape from all the terrible grandeur of these mountain powers, other fountains, other oceans break forth before you, for there, in clear view, over heaps and rows of foot hills is laid a grand, smooth outspread plain, watered by a river, and another range of peaky snow-capped mountains a hundred miles in the distance. That plain is the valley of the San Joaquin, and those mountains are the great Sierra Nevadas. The valley of the San Joaquin is the floweriest piece of world I ever walked, one vast level, even flower-bed, a sheet of flowers, a smooth sea ruffled a little by the tree fringing of the river and here and there of smaller cross streams from the mountains.…
—LETTER TO JEANNE C. CARR, JULY 26, [1868]
A New Earth Every Day
IT WAS JOHN MUIR’S VIEW that all of nature was a revelation of a dynamic God who is continuously creating the universe. Although Muir grew far beyond his father’s orthodox theology, he remained steeped in the language of the Bible, which he had memorized as a boy. “A New Heaven and a New Earth Every Day,” is an echo of The Revelation to John, Chapter 21, verse 1, “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth.”
Another glorious Sierra day, warm, crisp, fragrant, clear—On the way back to our Tuolumne camp, I enjoyed the scenery if possible more than when it first came to view. Every feature already seems familiar as if I had lived here always. I never weary gazing at the wonderful Cathedral [Peak]. It has more individual character than any other rock or mountain I ever saw, excepting perhaps the Yosemite South Dome. The forests, too, seem kindly familiar, and the lakes and meadows and glad singing streams. I should like to dwell with them forever. Here with bread and water I should be content.… Bathed in such beauty, watching the expressions ever varying on the faces of the mountains, watching the stars, which here have a glory that the lowlander never dreams of, watching the circling seasons, listening to the songs of the waters and winds and birds, would be endless pleasure.
And what glorious cloud-lands I should see, storms and calms—a new heaven and a new earth every day, aye and new inhabitants.… And why should this appear extravagant? It is only common sense, a sign of health, genuine, natural, all-awake health. One would be at an endless Godful play, and what speeches and music and acting and scenery and lights!—sun, moon, stars, auroras. Creation just beginning, the morning stars “still singing together and all the [creatures] of God shouting for joy.”
—JOURNAL ENTRY, JULY 27, 1868
A Window Opening into Heaven
ALL OF JOHN MUIR’S FIRST SUMMER in the Sierra was an epiphany, and during his hike to Lake Tenaya he was close to ecstasy. As he recounted, “… every crystal, every flower a window opening into heaven, a mirror reflecting the Creator.… In the midst of such beauty, pierced with its rays, one’s body is all one tingling palate.”
Up and away to Lake Tenaya—another big day, enough for a lifetime. The rocks, the air, everything speaking with audible voice or silent; joyful, wonderful, enchanting, banishing weariness and sense of time. No longing for anything now or hereafter as we go home into the mountain’s heart. The level sunbeams are touching the fir-tops, every leaf shining with dew. Am holding an easterly course, the deep canyon of Tenaya Creek on the right hand, Mt. Hoffman on the left, and the lake straight ahead about ten miles distant, the summit of Mt. Hoffman about three thousand feet above me, Tenaya Creek four thousand feet below and separated from the shallow, irregular valley, along which most of the way lies, by smooth domes and wave-ridges. Many mossy emerald bogs, meadows, and gardens in rocky hollows to wade and saunter through—and what fine plants they give me, what joyful streams I have to cross, and how many views are displayed of the Hoffman and Cathedral Peak masonry, and what a wondrous breadth of shining granite pavement to walk over for the first time about the shores of the lake! On I sauntered in freedom complete; body without weight as far as I was aware; now wading through starry parnassia [evergreen] bogs, now through gardens shoulder deep in larkspur and lilies, grasses and rushes, shaking off showers of dew; crossing piles of crystalline moraine boulders, bright mirror pavements, and cool, cheery streams going to Yosemite; crossing bryanthus [red heather] carpets and the scoured pathways of avalanches, and thickets of snow-pressed ceanothus [a woody shrub]; then down a broad, majestic stairway into the ice-sculptured lake-basin.
The snow on the high mountains is melting fast, and the streams are singing bank-full, swaying softly through the level meadows and bogs, quivering with sun-spangles, swirling in pot-holes, resting in deep pools, leaping, shouting in wild, exulting energy over rough boulder dams, joyful, beautiful in all their forms. No Sierra landscape that I have seen holds anything truly dead or dull, or any trace of what in manufactories is called rubbish or waste; everything is perfectly clean and pure and full of divine lessons. This quick, inevitable interest attaching to everything seems marvelous until the hand of God becomes visible; then it seems reasonable that what interests Him may well interest us. When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. One fancies a heart like our own must be beating in every crystal and cell, and we feel like stopping to speak to the plants and animals as friendly fellow-mountaineers. Nature as a poet, an enthusiastic workingman, becomes more and more visible the farther and higher we go; for the mountains are fountains—beginning places, however related to sources beyond mortal ken.
—JOURNAL ENTRY, JULY 27, 1868
The Sun’s Glorious Greeting
THIS SELECTION COMES FROM John Muir’s first book, The Mountains of California, published in 1894 when he was 56 years old. Drawn from journals he never intended to publish, the book is an extended homage to the mountains, glaciers, forests, and valleys, flora and fauna of the Sierra. Some of Muir’s favorite flowers mentioned here were varieties of heather, reminiscent of the heather on the hills of his native Scotland.
How
