The Scot who saved America’s parks

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Facing the setting sun, a buck with a towering rack of antlers stood silhouetted at the top of a rise. I’d surprised him, and he’d certainly surprised me. Somehow, in Yosemite National Park, one of the most famous places in the world, this glorious buck and I had found a moment of total solitude.

In large part, the fact that this encounter could even take place is thanks to a single, almost accidental trip. In March of 1868, an unknown Scottish-born wanderer and amateur botanist named John Muir arrived in San Francisco with plant-collecting gear and a thirst for the wild. Muir had finished an aimless 1,000-mile walk from Indiana to Florida, and planned to head next to South America to seek the source of the Amazon River and raft its length. However, a bout with malaria in Florida led him to contemplate a less strenuous journey, so he set course instead for California, where he’d read about the beauty of Yosemite Valley. A week-long visit to Yosemite turned into a five-year stint in the Sierra Nevada, and there blossomed a life-long passion for the wilderness that would change the face of global conservation.

: John Muir (1838-1914) enjoying the outdoors. (Universal History Archive/Getty)

One hundred years after Muir’s death, his initial 300-mile cross-California walk from San Francisco to Yosemite is not well known, but his conservation legacy lingers. In the United States, Muir is often called “the father of the national parks” both for his political advocacy through the environmental organisation the Sierra Club, which he cofounded in 1892, and also for his writing, which helped introduce the concept of wilderness conservation to new audiences around the world. Even today, in his home country, the Scottish Campaign for National Parks cites Muir as an inspiration for its continued efforts to turn more Scottish wilderness into national parks, and in April 2014 the new 134-mile trail from the town of Helensburgh to Muir’s birthplace of Dunbar was named in his honour.

By the time Muir arrived in San Francisco, Yosemite’s fame was already on the rise. Four years earlier, Abraham Lincoln had signed the Yosemite Grant Act, establishing Yosemite as a California State Park, the first land to be set aside by the US government for preservation and public use. Many more parks would follow suit, and Muir would be crucial to the process.

Muir knew the fastest route to Yosemite from San Francisco, but he didn’t take it. Instead, he chose the wildest: the one that would get him away from cities quickly and ensure wildflower spotting along the way. I recently followed Muir’s route by car, hoping to find what’s left of Muir’s California.

: Retracing John Muir's route. (Andy Murdock)

I picked up Muir’s trail in the city of Oakland, where he set out on foot after hopping a ferry from San Francisco. I then headed south past San Jose, cutting east at the town of Gilroy, and drove into the Diablo Range toward Pacheco Pass. Muir’s account of his trip, spread across more than a dozen of his publications, is at times dry and laced with botanical Latin, and at other times poetic and effusive. At a point near Pacheco Pass, Muir first saw the Sierra Nevada Mountains in the distance, a moment he described in his 1912 book The Yosemite:

“At my feet lay the Great Central Valley of California, level and flowery, like a lake of pure sunshine… And from the eastern boundary of this vast golden flower-bed rose the mighty Sierra, miles in height, and so gloriously coloured and so radiant, it seemed not clothed with light, but wholly composed of it, like the wall of some celestial city…Then it seemed to me that the Sierra should be called, not the Nevada or Snowy Range, but the Range of Light.”