In one of his first books, "The Mountains of California", John Muir, famed naturalist, environmentalist, and author, recounts his travels through the Sierra Nevada Mountains and Yosemite Valley. First published in 1894, "The Mountains of California" is a captivating and vivid portrait of the raw beauty of this spectacular place. He takes the readers on a tour of the wonders that abound, writing "Go where you may within the bounds of California, mountains...

John Muir (1838-1914) ranks among America's most important and influential environmentalists and nature writers. Devoted to the preservation of wilderness areas, Muir founded the Sierra Club and was active in the establishment of Yosemite National Park. Our National Parks, originally published in 1901, includes ten articles that previously appeared in The Atlantic Monthly. Muir wrote them in hopes of exciting interest in the parks, certain that visitors...

John Muir, famous for his naturalist essays and books, was over 70 years old when he wrote "The Yosemite" as a reflection on the beauty of the national park. Muir was a naturalist, so he was highly invested in describing the landscape, flora, and fauna of Yosemite National Park. He even said that "no temple with manmade hands can compare with Yosemite." Muir knew the terrain well, having hiked and climbed Cathedral Peak, Mount Dana, and the old Indian...

This heartwarming and hair-raising "icy-storm story," published in 1909, recounts Muir's Alaskan adventures in 1880 with his little black dog named Stickeen-an animal that Muir initially views with scorn but comes to regard with the greatest affection following a near-death experience on a frozen glacier.

As a student at the University of Wisconsin, John Muir often visited with Dr. Ezra Carr and his family, and the impressionable young man came to regard Mrs. Carr as his spiritual mother. A keen botanist, she shared Muir's passion for nature, and the two formed a lasting bond. After heading west to explore the wonders of Yosemite, the future founder of the Sierra Club and wilderness preservationist wrote many heartfelt letters to Mrs. Carr. In his...

Essayist. Preservationist. Mountain man. Inventor. John Muir may be California's best-known icon. A literary naturalist and founder of the Sierra Club and Yosemite National Park, Muir left his legacy on the landscape and on paper. But the celebrity of John Muir does not tell the whole story. In Essential Muir, for the first time, Muir's selected writings include those that show his ecological vision without ignoring his racism, providing a more complete...

John Muir agreed in 1881 to sail aboard the Corwin, whose fruitless mission it was to search for the missing scientific research vessel Jeannette, which itself became icebound while exploring the distant and mysterious Wrangell Land in the higher latitudes of the Arctic. This cruise would afford Muir the opportunity to examine evidence of glaciation along the arctic coastlines of Siberia and Alaska and the harmonious lifestyle of Inuits and Chukchis,...

From the photographer who brought Thoreau's Walden and Cape Cod to life comes a new work combining classic literature with brand-new photography. This time, Scot Miller takes on the seminal work of John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra. The book details Muir's first extended trip to the Sierra Nevada in what is now Yosemite National Park, a landscape that entranced him immediately and had a profound effect on his life. The towering waterfalls,...

This book examines the life and thought of three extraordinary black men. Part of what makes them extraordinary is that they traveled extensively throughout the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Unlike millions of uprooted Africans and their descendants at the time, these men did not have lives of toil and sweat in the plantations of the New World. One of them was born free, the other two became free in their youths, and it is this freedom that gave...

In this essay, Muir tells his experience of climbing to the top of a tree and riding it for hours through a wild Sierra storm. As he writes, "the danger to life and limb is hardly greater than one would experience crouching deprecatingly beneath a roof." This selection is part of the full length audiobook, "Storm: Stories of Survival From Land and Sea."