The Wilderness Journeys

Introduced by Graham White. ‘When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.’ John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra The name of John Muir has come to stand for the protection of wild land and wilderness in both America and Britain. Born in Dunbar in 1838, Muir is famed as the father of American conservation. This collection, including the rarely seen Stickeen, presents the finest of Muir’s writings, and imparts a rounded portrait of a man whose generosity, passion, discipline and vision are an inspiration to this day. Combining acute observation with a sense of inner discovery, Muir’s writings of his travels though some of the greatest landscapes on Earth, including the Carolinas, Florida, Alaska and those lands which were to become the great National Parks of Yosemite and the Sierra Valley, raise an awareness of nature to a spiritual dimension. These journals provide a unique marriage of natural history with lyrical prose and often amusing anecdotes, retaining a freshness, intensity and brutal honesty which will amaze the modern reader.