Steep Trails

No one wrote about nature with more eloquence or passion than John Muir, and this collection of essays, spanning nearly three decades of his work, shows him at his best. These writings about his travels to the lakes, canyons, and mountains of the American West make a fitting addition to the John Muir Library Series, our ongoing program to reissue the complete works of the first great conservationist author. The two dozen magazine articles and letters in this collection present the natural treasures of an unspoiled land as white settlers found them a century ago: the Great Salt Lake, the San Gabriel Mountains, Mount Rainer, the Grand Canyon.Here are Muir's accounts of a "perilous night" caught in a snowstorm on the summit of Mount Shasta; his rapture at sailing through Puget Sound and seeing the forests of Washington (as well as his ire, describing the proliferating lumber mills, at "this fierce storm of steel that is devouring our forest"); "A Geologist's Winter Walk" in Yosemite, where he found a "living glacier" with which to prove his controversial theory that glacial erosion had formed Yosemite Valley; "the feathered people" - golden eagles, ospreys, hawks, jays, hummingbirds, and others - "sailing the sky and enlivening the rocks and bushes through all the (Grand Canyon) wilderness"; and much more.
Filled with Muir's characteristic boldness and emotion, these stirring essays will appeal to his loyal readers today, just as they did a century ago.