Muir was passionate about wild places. He explored them, wrote about them and campaigned to protect them. Muir believed in protecting wild places — for their own sake, and for the wellbeing of people and wildlife. John Muir grew up in Dunbar, east of Edinburgh, where he developed an early love for wild places. Aged 10, he emigrated to the United States with his family. He was fascinated by everything in nature - from mosquitoes to mountain ranges - recognising that all of life is connected.
His passion for wild places led to a life-long quest to protect them. In his early life, Muir was an inventor and he brought a scientific curiosity to his later explorations.
He immersed himself in all aspects of the natural world, noticing and recording the interactions between plant, animal and planet. Prestonpans to North Berwick Walking the route 2. Cycling the route 3. Accessibility on the route 4. Horse-riding the route 5. Route maps 6. Passport 7. Certificates 8. Other essentials 9.
Additional routes Hill walks Accommodation Gallery News Store. Why John Muir? Muir's last battle to save the second Yosemite, Hetch Hetchy Valley , failed. But that lost battle ultimately resulted in a widespread conviction that our national parks should be held inviolate.
Many proposals to dam our national parks since that time have been stopped because of the efforts of citizens inspired by John Muir, and today there are legitimate proposals to restore Hetch Hetchy. Perhaps his greatest legacy is not even wilderness preservation or national parks as such, but his teaching us the essential characteristic of the science of ecology, the interrelatedness of all living things.
He summed it up nicely: "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe. Plants grew through the floorboards; he wove the threads of two ferns into what he called an "ornamental arch" over his writing desk. And he slept on sheepskin blankets over cedar branches. Today, Muir has become such an icon that it's hard to remember that he was ever a living human being, let alone a wide-eyed and adventurous young man—a Gilded Age flower child.
Even at the Yosemite Visitor Center, he's depicted in a life-size bronze statue as a wizened prophet with a Methuselah beard. In a nearby museum, his battered tin cup and the traced outline of his foot are displayed like religious relics.
And his pithy inspirational quotes—"Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine into trees"—are everywhere. But all this hero worship risks obscuring the real story of the man and his achievements. Others assume he lived here all his life. Later in life, Muir would return to Yosemite on shorter trips, burdened with his own celebrity and the responsibilities of family and work. But it was during the happy period of his relative youth, when he was free to amble around Yosemite, that Muir's ideas were shaped.
Some of his most famous adventures, recounted in his books The Yosemite and Our National Parks , were from this time.
This is where he decided who he was, what he wanted to say and how he was going to say it. When he first strode into Yosemite in the spring of , Muir was a scruffy Midwestern vagabond wandering the wilderness fringes of post-bellum America, taking odd jobs where he could. In retrospect, visiting Yosemite might seem an inevitable stop on his life's journey.
But his later recollections reveal a young man plagued with self-doubt and uncertainty, often lonely and confused about the future. But was I in it? John Muir was born in Dunbar, Scotland, in , the eldest son of a Calvinist shopkeeper father. Though his days were consumed with farm work, he was a voracious reader. By his mids, Muir seemed to have a career as an inventor ahead of him. His gadgets included an "early-rising bed," which raised the sleeper to an upright position, and a clock made in the shape of a scythe, to signify the advance of Father Time.
But after being nearly blinded in a factory mishap in , Muir decided to devote his life to studying the beauties of Creation.
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