“No Sierra landscape that I have seen holds anything truly dead or dull, or any trace of what in manufactories is called rubbish or waste; everything is perfectly clean and pure and full of divine lessons… When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe”.

These words - some of Muir’s most famous – are just a few of the many gems of My First Summer in the Sierra. Muir’s 1911 book traces his summer as a sheepherder in the Sierra, discovering and delighting in the smallest flowers and largest mountains. Muir’s delight is infectious, and had a huge impact on the history of preservation and management of wild lands in the United States. Whether or not this article inspires you to read the book, I hope to offer a working knowledge of Muir’s influence in his time, and his relevance for contemporary readers.

My First Summer in the Sierra showcases Muir's ability to write both from a scientific as well as an artistic perspective.

My First Summer in the Sierra

My First Summer in the Sierra reads like a highly stylized diary of the eponymous season. After a boyhood in Scotland and Wisconsin, a young adulthood exploring a talent for engineering, and an accident that resulted in his near blindness, Muir headed for California, and first visited the Sierra in 1868. He was so enchanted by his early visits that he took a job the next summer as a sort of supervisor to a shepherd. The flock would begin in the foothills, and move higher through the mountains as the snow melted. His employer assured him that the job would allow him to spend ample time exploring the Sierra, and, as the reader learns, it does.

For readers familiar with the Yosemite area, particularly those who have driven from the Central Valley up to Tuolumne Meadows and perhaps even beyond, the book covers familiar territory, but at a shepherd’s pace. As the party travels through the foothills and gradually upward into lower montane, upper montane, and ultimately the sub-alpine territory of the Tuolumne Meadows environs, Muir naturalizes, sketches, adventures, and writes with an almost unbelievable level of enthusiasm. It should be said here that this book is not one to be read for the plot – in fact, if you are concerned about spoilers, they’ve already been given away in this short description.

While narrative arc isn’t the strong suit, the book has plenty of other engaging factors. The most fascinating to me is Muir’s intense level of enthusiasm for everything he deems wild. Consider this description:

“How interesting everything is! Every rock, mountain, stream, plant, lake, lawn, forest, garden, beat, bird, insect seems to call and invite us to come and learn something of its history and relationship".

Muir’s effusiveness continues throughout the book. He does indeed find everything interesting, and offers detailed descriptions of his surroundings. Often, as in this instance, his descriptions are combined with musings on how his surroundings influence him, with a suggestion that they may have a similar impact on others.

Another striking feature of Muir’s writing is his ability to function simultaneously as a scientist and artist, using the two perspectives to enhance each other. In his conclusions, he states that “the most telling thing learned in these mountain excursions is the influence of cleavage joints on the features sculptured from the general mass of the range. Evidently the denudation has been enormous, while the inevitable outcome is subtle balanced beauty”. The understanding of cleavage joints was relatively new at the time, and in fact, Muir’s observations of Sierra glaciers were critical to our current understanding of the region’s geologic history. Without hesitation, he leaps between astute scientific observations and aesthetic musings.

Some of these features are particularly significant in terms of understanding the historical significance of the book. As Roderick Frazier Nash describes in Wilderness and the American Mind, Muir was writing at a time when American attitudes about wilderness were in the midst of a transition. His primary intellectual predecessors, Emerson and Thoreau, had popularized the transcendentalist idea that nature could be associated with Godliness, in opposition to earlier tendencies to associate it with the Devil and evil. He says, for example, “No other place has ever so overwhelmingly attracted me as this hospitable, Godful wilderness (279)”.

This association of wilderness and Godliness was sparked in part by the changing American landscape, as “wilderness” became more scarce, while towns and cities became more ubiquitous. Muir functioned as a sort of west coast iteration of some of earlier transcendentalist tendencies. The western part of the country had larger tracts of wilderness, and less human influence than the New England landscapes. Along with this came, for Muir, a more extreme desire to devote his life to wilderness than Thoreau and Emerson had modeled. His writing publicized the wilderness and drew people to it. Ultimately, Muir was instrumental in arguing for the creation of Yosemite as a National Park.

In its day, Muir’s writing advanced the cultural conversation about the nature of wilderness, and helped lead to the creation of protected wilderness areas. We now live in a world with a very different relationship to wilderness. The association of wilderness with Godliness is no longer novel, and narratives of wilderness as spiritually cleansing are commonplace. Modern wilderness is much more well defined than it was in Muir’s day – in 1964, the Wilderness Act defined “Wilderness” and set out rules for its management. In addition to our wilderness areas, we have a complex hierarchy of preserved areas – National Forests, National Parks, Monuments, etc. – which were just beginning to develop in Muir’s day.

A modern perspective on wilderness issues makes some of Muir’s ideas read as naive. For example, thanks to the work of William Cronon and others, it is now more widely understood that very little of the North American continent was ever unimpacted by humans. Many of the areas that we treasure as undeveloped have had people living in them for tens of thousands of years. While this doesn’t devalue the wilderness areas we have, it does complicate the definition of wilderness as an area unimpacted by people. In Muir’s time, these complexities were little known, so for the modern reader, some of his ideas about the nature of wilderness and the native groups living there feel simplistic.

What, then, is the role of Muir’s work for a modern reader? Muir’s infectious enthusiasm and striking visual descriptions offer one sort of inspiration. As I read his effusive descriptions, I wondered – what would my life be like if I took that much delight in everything? The constant celebration could be exhausting, but overall I finished the book inspired to celebrate the natural world more thoughtfully, even in my suburban environment. Muir’s delight could also make the book an enriching read before, during, or after a trip to the Sierra. He illuminates treasures that might not otherwise catch our eye. Bringing a copy of My First Summer in the Sierra for evening reading on a Yosemite trip would be like having an outstandingly enthusiastic and knowledgeable personal guide.

Final Thoughts

Muir’s confidence in combining science and art is also valuable for the modern reader. Many of us are taught to think of ourselves as either scientific or artistic, left or right-brained. Muir’s embrace of both might inspire us to do the same. How might our personal excursions to the backcountry be enhanced by Muir’s style of naturalizing? To follow in his footsteps, we might observe something that strikes us, take the time to sketch it, ask questions about its life history, and see if our observations can help answer our questions. While it’s often tempting to fill our wilderness adventures with accomplishments, including this model of observation could provide an additional dimension for our travels. Perhaps letting the lines between science, art, spirituality, and adventure blur a little could enrich our lives.

Muir’s work had a great level of influence in his time, and while our culture around wilderness has changed significantly, his writing still holds allure and promise for inspiration.

You can pick up a copy of My First Summer in the Sierra here at Amazon.com.

Editor's Note: This review originally appeared in Issue 21 of TrailGroove Magazine. You can read the original article here for additional content.