Читать книгу The John Muir Trail. Through the Californian Sierra Nevada онлайн

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It was a decision that was to change the whole direction of his life. At the age of 30 he entered Yosemite for the first time and was awe-struck by what he saw. ‘I only took a walk in the Yosemite,’ he later said, ‘but stayed for six years’. California, and particularly Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada, would become his home, both physically and spiritually. To Muir the Sierra Nevada was ‘the Range of Light…the most divinely beautiful of all the mountain chains I have ever seen.’

Octogenarian Al Ansorge (seated far left) in Vermilion Valley Resort dining room during his tenth trek along the JMT

John Muir had considerable mountaineering talents, being attributed with the first ascent of Mount Ritter and with one of the early winter ascents of Half-Dome. But it is for becoming the first conservationist that he is really remembered. Muir was one of the first people to study the science of ecology and to witness at first hand, from his pine cabin home in Yosemite, the damaging effects of the hand of man. He developed a theory of glaciation to explain the formation of Yosemite Valley, and in 1874 started his career as a successful and influential writer. At the age of 42 in 1880 Muir married Louise Strentzel and moved to Martinez, California (now a John Muir National Historic Site), where he ran a fruit farm and brought up his family of two daughters, Helen and Wanda. JMT walkers will pass two mountain lakes that were named after these daughters, either side of the Muir Pass (Day 13). He still managed to travel widely, visiting Alaska, South America, Africa, Australia and elsewhere. He returned to Scotland on only one occasion, to the Highlands, Dunbar, Edinburgh and Dumfries, in 1893.