Mountaineering Essays

By John Muir

Book Overview

One of the world's foremost writers of the mountaineering essay--his writings are finely wrought expressions of the transcendental joy he found in the mountains--John Muir also founded the Sierra Club in 1892 as a way of supporting his belief that Americans must preserve national parks throughout the country in order that future generations might be spiritually inspired. Characterized by an iron endurance and an insatiable curiosity, Muir vowed to spend his days studying God's unwritten Bible--nature--or what he termed the "University of the Wilderness." Muir early on learned to keep a journal in the manner of Emerson, but he is also considered one of America's pioneer glaciologists, an interest he gained while wandering in Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada mountains. Whether frozen in a subzero blizzard on Mount Shasta, seemingly doomed on the unforgiving slopes of Mount Ritter, or exhilarated by the ice-shapes viewed from the summit of Mount Rainier, Muir reveled in the mountain experience. This volume contains eleven mountain essays that include both adventurous narrative, joyful exultation, and descriptions of natural features such as alpine soil beds, ancient glaciers and living glaciers, and mountain sculpture. In each, Muir maintains a careful and subtle balance between the physical aspects of ascending and the more symbolic observations of the sublimity of his surroundings. Mountains are for him a source of discovery that provide an affirmation of the human spirit.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0874805449
• ISBN13: 9780874805444
• Release Date: August 1997
• Publisher: University of Utah Press
• Length: 300 Pages
• Weight: 0.56 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.1" x 8.1"
• Age Range: 15 years and up
• Grade Range: Grade 9 and higher

Customer Reviews

this book is the crystal of John Muir's writing

Three books I like best writen by John Muir are 'My First summer in the Sierra', 'The Mountains of California',and 'Travels in Alaska'. Three writings I love best from each book are 'The Tuolumne camp', 'A Near View of the High Sierra', and 'My Sled-trip on the Muir Glacier'. If I carried only this Fleck's edition, I always can read my best three articles. Nevertheless, this edition contains a rare article 'Mountain thoughts', which is my Gospel and essence of John Muir's thought and mind, which you could not find easy in other books except 'John of the Mountains', original thick edition. The introduction written by Fleck is another joy where our human spirit and primal Muir's nature fuse.