Five-minute digest
The Mountains of California
Summary
The Mountains of California, John Muir's first book, gathers and revises essays he had written over two decades of wandering in the Sierra Nevada into a portrait of the whole range, from its glaciers and peaks down to its forests, birds and flowering foothills. It opens with a view from the Pacheco Pass across the Central Valley, then carpeted with golden flowers, to the luminous wall of mountains that Muir says should be called not the Snowy Range but the Range of Light. The early chapters explain how the landscape was made. Muir describes the few small living glaciers he found in the high cirques, beginning with one on the Merced group in 1871, and argues that ancient ice sheets carved the cañons, polished the granite, scooped out the lake basins and left the moraines on which meadows and forests now grow. Chapters on snow, passes, glacier lakes and glacier meadows follow the water from its icy fountains downward. The fourth chapter, a near view of the High Sierra, tells of his solitary first ascent of Mount Ritter, where, clinging to a cliff and unable to move, he is seized by fear until a sudden clearness returns and carries him to the summit. The long chapter on the forests describes each of the great conifers in turn, the sugar pine, yellow pine, Douglas spruce, incense cedar, firs and the Big Tree, as distinct characters with their own forms and voices. The following chapters are among Muir's most famous: the Douglas squirrel, whom he calls the most interesting and influential of the California squirrels; a December wind-storm in the Yuba River country, which he rides out at the top of a swaying hundred-foot spruce; spring floods and summer thunderstorms; the water-ouzel, the little gray bird that sings beside every waterfall; and the wild sheep, whose agility on cliffs he contrasts with the timidity of tame flocks. The book closes in the gold-mining foothills around Murphy's Camp and in the bee-pastures of the Central Valley, where Muir mourns the vast flower beds already being lost to plows and grazing. Published by The Century Company in 1894, two years after Muir helped found the Sierra Club, the book combines scientific argument with praise of the Creator's handiwork and an implicit plea that the mountains be protected.
Top Lessons
Reading the book of the landscape
Muir treats polished rock, moraines, lake basins and meadows as evidence that can be read. He shows students that careful observation over many years can overturn the accepted theory of experts.
Courage and deliverance
On Mount Ritter Muir is trapped on a cliff and overwhelmed by fear, then suddenly finds himself calm and precise. He calls the power that guided him Instinct or a Guardian Angel and does not explain it away. The episode invites reflection on fear, providence and the limits of self-reliance.
Every creature has a character
Muir writes about the Douglas squirrel, the water-ouzel and the wild sheep as individuals with courage, cheer and skill. His portraits teach close attention and respect for small creatures as part of an ordered creation.
What is lost when land is used carelessly
The book ends with the vanishing flower beds of the Central Valley and laments the damage done by sheep and plows. Muir does not oppose farming, but he asks readers to notice what is being lost and to value it.
Verified Quotes
Frequently cited
“Then it seemed to me the Sierra should be called not the Nevada, or Snowy Range, but the Range of Light.”
“But this terrible eclipse lasted only a moment, when life blazed forth again with preternatural clearness.”
“Being accustomed to climb trees in making botanical studies, I experienced no difficulty in reaching the top of this one, and never before did I enjoy so noble an exhilaration of motion.”
Frequently cited
“We all travel the milky way together, trees and men; but it never occurred to me until this storm-day, while swinging in the wind, that trees are travelers, in the ordinary sense.”
Frequently cited
“He is the mountain streams’ own darling, the humming-bird of blooming waters, loving rocky ripple-slopes and sheets of foam as a bee loves flowers, as a lark loves sunshine and meadows.”
“The tame is timid; the wild is bold.”
“The Great Central Plain of California, during the months of March, April, and May, was one smooth, continuous bed of honey-bloom, so marvelously rich that, in walking from one end of it to the other, a distance of more than 400 miles, your foot would press about a hundred flowers at every step.”
Medical Lens
The Mount Ritter chapter is a striking first-person account of acute fear in danger and its sudden resolution. Muir describes becoming nerve-shaken, as if his mind were filled with stifling smoke, and then a heightened state in which every flaw in the rock seems magnified and his limbs move without conscious direction. He attributes it to instinct or a guardian angel; modern readers may compare it to accounts of the stress response in climbers. Elsewhere the book treats storm, exercise and mountain air as tonic to body and spirit. These are personal impressions rather than medical claims.
- Chapter IV
Trapped on a cliff on Mount Ritter, Muir is overcome by fear and then by an unnatural clearness and steadiness that carries him to the summit.
- Chapter X
Muir describes the exhilaration of riding a treetop in a gale and the tonic fragrance of the wind.