![]() ![]() ![]() On his return, Roosevelt took a series of decisions that seem to confirm this: in 1906 he signed a federal law to make Yosemite Valley and Mariposa Grove part of Yosemite National Park, after a 17-year campaign by Muir and the Sierra Club, while declaring Petrified Forest in Arizona a national park. For the National Park Service this trip can be considered the most significant in the history of conservation. Roosevelt and Muir camped for three nights among sequoias, woke up covered by a thin layer of snow, visited el Capitan and were photographed at Glacier Point. The camping trip finally took place in 1903. “I do not want anyone with me but you, and I want to drop politics absolutely for four days and just be out in the open with you, ” the president wrote. In 1901, Our National Parks was published, and after reading it, then-President Theodore Roosevelt wrote to Muir asking him to be his guide at Yosemite. Three nights among sequoias with the president Two years later, Muir founded the Sierra Club, a nature protection organization that he presided over until his death and that is still active today.įor Delibes, Muir’s capacity for suggestion had more to do with the emotion and respect for nature distilled in his writings -he published more than 300 articles and a dozen books -than with calls to preserve it. In 1890 it did: Yosemite went from a state-run reserve in California to a national park. Muir began a campaign to ensure that Yosemite received the same degree of protection as Yellowstone National Park (the world’s first) had obtained in 1872. ![]() With evident literary talent, he shared his love for nature with the American middle class and they, according to Delibes de Castro, were “transported to the mountains, caressed by the wind, purified by the waterfalls, at the same time as they realized that those wonders could disappear”. In 1874 he began to describe this relationship in the main magazines of the time: Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, New York Tribune, Scribner’s and Century. Muir became a sage, a tall, ungainly man who felt a deep connection with the natural world.” View across Hetch Hetchy Valley, early 1900s. As Miguel Delibes de Castro, former director of the Doñana biological station, writes in the prologue to the book about Muir, Cuadernos de Montaña : “Nothing for him lacked interest, from the highest geological monuments to the most modest creatures. He remained here, more or less permanently, until 1874, dedicating himself to exploring every corner of the mountain range, climbing mountains, guiding sheep, studying their geology -he correctly suggested that glaciations, and not earthquakes, had been the forces from which Yosemite had been born- and observing trees, flowers and beetles. Until he first came to Yosemite in 1868, Muir’s life had certainly been full: he had studied geology, chemistry and botany at Madison University but never graduated he had invented amazing mechanical devices -like a spring to lift one out of bed he had lost his sight in one eye while working in a factory, only to recover it unexpectedly months later he had travelled through Canada during the US Civil War he had contracted malaria… And it was precisely in search of a benign climate to recover from this disease that Muir arrived in Yosemite. When he died aged 76 he had become the most famous and influential naturalist of a country brimming with a wealth of wilderness within the approximately 4,200 kilometres that separate its ocean shores and that by the end of the nineteenth century had already begin to pale. Credit: National Park Serviceīorn in 1838 in rainy Scotland, John Muir emigrated with his family to the United States at the age of 11. There he spent three days with President Roosevelt, three crucial days for U.S. And from the Sierra Nevada one valley: Yosemite. national parks, but only one was his true love: the California Sierra Nevada, a formidable granite structure perched between the turbulent Pacific Ocean and the reddish, ochre soil of the state of Nevada. But he cannot save them from fools.” “Between every two pine trees there is a door leading to a new way of life.” “The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.” John Muir wrote almost as many famous phrases about the beauty -almost mystical in his eyes- of wild nature as Americans he convinced to conserve it. “God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand tempests and floods. ![]()
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