Ronald Turnbull - Muir and More: John Muir, His Life and Walks

One days exposure to mountains is better than cartloads of books.

John Muir

Every game has its homeland. Walking up pretty hills and going to the pub: you can do it in various parts of the world, but Englands Lakeland is where its all about. My personal game of austere hikes with bivvy-bag is basically Highland Scotland. Mountaineeringrocky ridges, snowy crests, glaciers happens in the Alps and is referred to in several languages as Alpinism. Nepal is the spiritual centre of yakpackinghand your luggage to a helpful inhabitant who also boils the evening lentils, get altitude sickness, use up a lot of photo film and not that much boot sole.

What St Andrews is to golf, North America is to backpacking. Country where you walk for 250 miles without crossing a road; where you get attacked by biting insects but also by bears; where you camp for five days while a river runs down after a storm. And so we get the frightful ergonomics of how to don a 50lb rucksack: that being an act I set off from Yosemite sincerely hoping not to have to perform. In navigation, the technique of aiming-off is applied over a fortnight of empty country, eventually arriving at the handrail road just 40 miles from the intended target.

And yet, like golf itself, like deerstalking, backpacking seems to have been invented by a Scotsman. I only took a walk in the Yosemite, says Johnnie Muir from Dunbar, but stayed for six years. America invites excess, and Americans do tend to overdo things. Even so, Muirs followers along the Pacific Crest and Appalachian Trails spend a mere six months afoot before retiring to some cosy city to replace their equipment, relearn their social skills, and earn a little money for the next hiking season.

So to call the John Muir Trail, in Californias Sierra Nevada, the best long walk in the world is wrong straight away. By the standards of the country, and of the man who gave it his name, its a short saunter that, even if you embrace that unnecessarily heavy backpack, still takes a mere three weeks. Cricket is the best game in the worldif you happen to like cricket. Long or not, the John Muir Trail is the best walk in the worldif what you like is a self-reliant journey through remote country inhabited by bears. If what you like is a mule path through the wilderness and being a beast of burden yourself as you hoof along it. If what you like is big trees and bare granite. If what you like is

a wide, well-built path that after five days heads gradually down to the outflow of a narrow lake. The slopes around the lake are tumbled boulders and ice-smoothed granite slabs, but the path is terraced across the stone-fields and carved into the occasional outcrop. The tree roots tangle in a maze of boulders, and their trunks and branches above are twisted in sympathy.

Beyond the lake rises a tall, shapely mountain. On our map it has no name, and some of its buttresses might even be unclimbed, for we are several days away from the nearest car-parks. Half-way through a September afternoon, me and Tom may be the only people looking at this particular mountain and this particular lake.

The lake we look at is blue-grey; the sky above is grey with patches of gangrene yellow. Small thunderstorms are rumbling among the summits. We cross the outflow, and emerge from the lakes hanging valley to a hollow of dark forests. Ten miles away, the opposite slopes are mottled with scrub, then rise to slabs and domes of bare granite.

We descend in zigzags to a trail that contours along the valley. Between thick trunks we glimpse again the forest hollow below us. By late afternoon, the trail is descending again, to the outflow of Purple Lake. A single angler stands on the opposite shore. We drop the packs onto the strip of meadow between the lakeside and the rising trees. We stand for a minute. We wiggle our shoulder blades, let the power of thinking seep back into tired minds.

Just as weve got the tent up, it rains. It rains for twenty minutes; while I lie and listen to it on the green nylon, Thomas stands outside to see if hes going to get wet. The sun comes out, and we pour boiling water onto our dehydrated supper. Above the Purple Lake, buttresses of black basalt interrupt the granite hillside. As the sun sinks, the paler rocks turn golden. By the time weve finished eating, the forest is slaty grey, the granite rocks are delicate greyish pink.

The fishermen are apologetic. It doesnt normally do this, not at this time of year.

They didnt really need to be embarrassed. Never, in my life so far, have I walked six days with only twenty minutes rain.

You see, were from Scotland.

Oh, but John Muir was from Scotland!

He was indeed; and, a century after his death, Scotland is starting to wake up to the fact. The Loch Lomond National Park has wandered through the Sierra Club website, clipping sweetly-scented Muir quotes for its brochures and signage. Nineteen of his words have been carved into the new Scottish Parliament building in Edinburgh. But never mind the words: his walks have been commemorated with a 45-mile John Muir Way along the bleak East Lothian coastline where he fell into the rock pools as a boy. In his name also, Schiehallion, Blaven and Ben Nevis have been purchased for wildlife and the people.