David T. Page - Explorer’s Guide Yosemite & the Southern Sierra Nevada

The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and . . . in Wildness is the preservation of the world. Every tree sends its fibres forth in search of the Wild. The cities import it at any price. Men plow and sail for it. From the forest and wilderness come the tonics and barks which brace mankind. Our ancestors were savages. The story of Romulus and Remus being suckled by a wolf is not a meaningless fable. The founders of every state which has risen to eminence, have drawn their nourishment and vigor from a similar wild source. It is because the children of the empire were not suckled by the wolf that they were conquered and displaced by the children of the northern forests who were.

Henry David Thoreau, The Atlantic Monthly , 1862

I n the spring of 1868, less than a month before his 30th birthday, a wild-haired itinerant college dropout by the name of John Muir, by his own account with incredibly little money and no guidebook, stepped off a Panama steamer at the Port of San Francisco. Hed quit his job at a carriage-parts shop the previous fall and had walked a thousand miles from Indianapolis to the Gulf of Mexico, holding a generally southward course, like the birds when they are going from summer to winter. Hed spent a few months in Cuba, looking at plants, had had a notion to go to South Americato wander up and then float back down the Amazonbut then crossed the Isthmus at Panama instead, and ended up in California.

The way he tells it, the first thing he did was walk up and ask a fellow for the best way out of town.

But where do you want to go? the fellow asked. To any place that is wild, said Muir.

The fellow pointed the way to the Oakland Ferry.

Muir got himself a pocket map of some kind, booked passage across the bay, took rough bearings from the sun, and then proceeded to wade across the Central Valley through a sea of waist-deep wildflowersto what he would later describe as the most divinely beautiful of all the mountain-chains I have ever seen.

Here he would spend the rest of his lifegive or take a trip or three around the world. Here he would climb countless peaks, explore innumerable canyons, tally thousands of tree rings. He would write 10 books and hundreds of articles; ride an avalanche; climb to the top of a 100-foot-tall spruce tree in a gale-force windstorm; establish the Sierra Club as a force to be reckoned with; and serve as personal tour guide to Ralph Waldo Emerson and Teddy Roosevelt. His was a dauntless soul, wrote the president and onetime Rough Rider. At age 73 Muir finally made that trip to Brazilit was 1911as part of an epic, 40,000-mile, cross-country, cross-ocean, solo adventure that took him not only up the Amazon to the Andes, but to deep Africa and the headwaters of the Nile.

Muir was not a big fan of guidebooks, especially of the stay-here, eat-this, buy-that variety. Most people who travel, he wrote, look only at what they are directed to look at.