I’m currently on disc 1 of Ken Burns’ national parks documentary series. loving the section about John Muir, especially this quote:

“I will follow my instincts, be myself for good or ill, and see what will be the upshot. As long as I live, I’ll hear waterfalls and birds and winds sing. I’ll interpret the rocks, learn the language of flood, storm, and avalanche. I’ll acquaint myself with the glaciers and wild gardens, and get as near to the heart of the world as I can. . . .I could have been a millionaire, but I chose to become a tramp.”

Looking eastward from the summit of Pacheco Pass one shining morning, a landscape was displayed that after all my wanderings still appears as the most beautiful I have ever beheld. At my feet lay the Great Central Valley of California, level and flowery, like a lake of pure sunshine, forty or fifty miles wide, five hundred miles long, one rich furred garden of yellow Compositae. And from the eastern boundary of this vast golden flower-bed rose the mighty Sierra, miles in height, and so gloriously colored and so radiant, it seemed not clothed with light but wholly composed of it, like the wall of some celestial city…. Then it seemed to me that the Sierra should be called, not the Nevada or Snowy Range, but the Range of Light. And after ten years of wandering and wondering in the heart of it, rejoicing in its glorious floods of light, the white beams of the morning streaming through the passes, the noonday radiance on the crystal rocks, the flush of the alpenglow, and the irised spray of countless waterfalls, it still seems above all others the Range of Light.

So extraordinary is Nature with her choicest treasures, spending plant beauty as she spends sunshine, pouring it forth into land and sea, garden and desert. And so the beauty of lilies falls on angels and men, bears and squirrels, wolves and sheep, birds and bees….

Brought into right relationships with the wilderness, man would see that his appropriation of Earth’s resources beyond his personal needs would only bring imbalance and begat ultimate loss and poverty by all.

Any fool can destroy trees. They cannot run away; and if they could, they would still be destroyed – chased and hunted down as long as fun or a dollar could be got out of their bark hides. Branching horns, or magnificent bole backbones. Few that fell trees plant them; nor would planting avail much towards getting back anything like the noble primeval forests. It took more than three thousand years to make some of the trees in these Western woods – trees that are still standing in perfect strength and beauty, waving and singing in the mighty forests of the Sierra. Through all the wonderful, eventful centuries God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand straining, leveling tempests and floods; but he cannot save them from fools – only Uncle Sam can do that.

No synonym for God is so perfect as Beauty. Whether as seen carving the lines of the mountains with glaciers, or gathering matter into stars, or planning the movements of water, or gardening – still all is Beauty!

In God’s wildness lies the hope of the world – the great fresh unblighted, unredeemed wilderness. The galling harness of civilization drops off, and wounds heal ere we are aware.

We all flow from one fountain Soul. All are expressions of one Love. God does not appear, and flow out, only from narrow chinks and round bored wells here and there in favored races and places, but He flows in grand undivided currents, shoreless and boundless over creeds and forms and all kinds of civilizations and peoples and beasts, saturating all and fountainizing all.

The wrongs done to trees, wrongs of every sort, are done in the darkness of ignorance and unbelief, for when the light comes, the heart of the people is always right.

Fresh beauty opens one’s eyes wherever it is really seen, but the very abundance and completeness of the common beauty that besets our steps prevents its being absorbed and appreciated. It is a good thing, therefore, to make short excursions now and then to the bottom of the sea among dulse and coral, or up among the clouds on mountain-tops, or in balloons, or even to creep like worms into dark holes and caverns underground, not only to learn something of what is going on in those out-of-the-way places, but to see better what the sun sees on our return to common everyday beauty.

Another glorious day, the air as delicious to the lungs as nectar to the tongue.

John Muir

Come to the woods, for here is rest. There is no repose like that of the green deep woods. Here grow the wallflower and the violet. The squirrel will come and sit upon your knee, the logcock will wake you in the morning. Sleep in forgetfulness of all ill. Of all the upness accessible to mortals, there is no upness comparable to the mountains.

John Muir

When we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with other stars all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty.

John Muir

Keep close to Nature’s heart… and break clear away, once in awhile, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.

None of Nature’s landscapes are ugly so long as they are wild.

I know that our bodies were made to thrive only in pure air, and the scenes in which pure air is found.

The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.

John Muir

Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul alike.

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.

John Muir

Walk away quietly in any direction and taste the freedom of the mountaineer. Camp out among the grasses and gentians of glacial meadows, in craggy garden nooks full of nature’s darlings. Climb the mountains and get their good tidings, Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves. As age comes on, one source of enjoyment after another is closed, but nature’s sources never fail.

John Muir

This is my first entry on a blog to record  quotes and passages from lovers of Nature.  I have just started reading John Burroughs and felt inspired to have a place to save the quotes after reading two pages of his first book Wake Robin.  I plan on doing a study of the great American Naturalists, for years my favorite poet has been Walt Whitman and often re-read his great poem; The Song Of The Rolling Earth which i shall soon add to this blog.  There are others that i have  read such as John Muir, Wendall Berry, and Mary Oliver that i will include on this new blogging adventure.

This is from Wikipedia:

John Burroughs (April 3, 1837 – March 29, 1921) was an American naturalist and essayist important in the evolution of the U.S. conservation movement. According to biographers at the American Memory project at the Library of Congress, John Burroughs was the most important practitioner after Thoreau of that especially American literary genre, the nature essay. By the turn of the century he had become a virtual cultural institution in his own right: the Grand Old Man of Nature at a time when the American romance with the idea of nature, and the American conservation movement, had come fully into their own. His extraordinary popularity and popular visibility were sustained by a prolific stream of essay collections, beginning with Wake-Robin in 1871.

In the words of his biographer Edward Renehan, Burroughs’ special identity was less that of a scientific naturalist than that of “a literary naturalist with a duty to record his own unique perceptions of the natural world.” The result was a body of work whose perfect resonance with the tone of its cultural moment perhaps explains both its enormous popularity at that time, and its relative obscurity since.

Changing the Beat
A Study of the Worklife of Jazz Musicians by Joan Jeffri. (pdf download)

California Grapevine webcam (Lone Juniper Ranch  off Interstate 5).

From the site -” The Lone Juniper Ranch is located atop the Tejon Pass just south of the famous Grapevine stretch of the Interstate 5 Freeway. The two images below are from cameras looking south into our animal pens and north towards the Grapevine. The alpacas and llamas are more often visible in the mornings. The Alpaca Cam runs from 6:00am to approximately dusk. The Grapevine Cam runs 24 hours a day.”

Wine Rec
Muirs Legacy Wine – “Muir-Hanna Vineyards is a family owned and operated vineyard and winery in California’s famed Napa Valley. We are direct descendants of John Muir, one of America’s most famous naturalists and conservationists.”

Song Without Words

Portrait Of Anna Vaughn Hyatt

Portrait Of John Muir

Garibaldi

Apple Blossom

Portrait Of Mr. Charles Pierce

The Blue Kimono

Young Woman Looking At A Glass Vase

California Western (Cactus Still Life)

Canadian Rockies

Nineteenth century author, naturalist and founder of the Sierra Club – John Muir called the giant Sequoia “the noblest of a noble race” for many worthy reasons.

These exquisite specimens date back to at least 150 million years ago to the Jurassic Period – a time when the great plant-eating dinosaurs ruled the land and the ocean was stocked with the great ichthyosaurs and the long-necked plesiosaurs. 

Magnificent giant Sequioas once thrived from Alaska to the Midwest, from Europe to the Orient and even in Greenland. 

Big trees, as they are affectionately known, have survived epic geologic upheavals and extreme climate changes. As a matter of fact, on Specimen Ridge in Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, there’s a fossilized 26-foot Sequoia stump jutting up amongst 40 million year old volcanic debris. 

About 18 million years ago the remaining giant Sequoia populations mostly occurred in southern Idaho and western Nevada. As the climate cooled and continued to dry-out the giant Sequoia were forced to migrate southwest. They managed to expand their range west into California before the Sierra Nevada range became the formidable backbone of the state. The mountains cut-off any moisture and the eastern population of big trees perished. 

When the early settlers discovered these colossal trees they senselessly felled and abandoned them because they were simply too big and too costly to handle. To give you some idea of their stature it took four men working 22 days to fell one tree.

John Muir convinced newspaperman Colonel George W. Stewart of Visalia, Calif, to protect them.

Today, they are one of the rarest tree species in the U.S. and are scattered in about 75 groves occupying 39,500 acres, ranging in elevation between 5,000 and 7,000 feet above sea level along a 250-mile stretch of the western Sierra Nevada’s.

In order for these gargantuan trees to make a living – especially during the hot dry summers – they require at least 60 inches of precipitation, which mostly occurs from November to April as accumulated snowfall. It’s not uncommon for a 16-foot snowpack to sit on the ground. Incidentally, it’s this accumulated snowfall that provides California, the eighth mightiest economy on the globe, the most intensive agriculture system on Earth, 38 million residents and millions of tourists each year with 90 percent of the state’s water. 

So just how big do these giant trees get? If Tyrannosaurus-Rex sauntered from behind a giant Sequoia even it too would be dwarfed.

These rich-cinnamon barked beauties can easily attain 280 feet in height with 29 feet diameters. One giant Sequoia may contain more wood than an entire old growth eastern hardwood forest can grow in two acres.

Even the name Sequoia is steeped with history. Sequoyah was a brilliant Cherokee Native American who developed a written version of his people’s language. Its present botanical name Sequoiadendron giganteum translates to “the giant Sequoia tree.”

In addition to possessing an astounding trunk at its base this species exhibits very little taper as it grows towards the heavens. For instance, many old trees retain their first branches at 120 feet above the ground – diameters of trunks this high off the ground easily exceed 16 feet. And, Sequoias can live for at least 3,200 years meaning they would witness more than 1.1 million sunrises.

All the ancient trees have been named. General Sherman lives in Sequoia National Park and he’s awesome; the undisputed heavyweight champion of the tree world.

General Sherman is the largest single-stemmed tree on Earth: At 274.9 feet tall; circumference at the ground is 102.9 feet; diameter at the base is 36.4 feet; 110 feet above the ground his diameter is an astonishing 17.4 feet. His first branch occurs 129.9 feet off the ground or the equivalent of a 12-story building and it’s 7.2 feet thick rising another 127.9 feet into the sky. 

His roots occupy 91,500 cubic feet of soil and his trunk hold over 138,000 gallons of soil water. 

General Sherman is about 2,400 years old yet he’s the fastest growing tree on the globe adding the equivalent radial wood of a tree 1.5 feet thick and 62 feet tall each year!

The ecology of giant Sequoias is fascinating. They have evolved with fire, 2.5-feet thick bark, loaded with tannic acid – the same chemical used in fire extinguishers worldwide helps protect mature trees from surface fires. The fire exposes the mineral soil for falling seeds to germinate.

Douglas squirrels can cut up to 10,000 cones in a season, eating the fleshy cone scales and releasing two million seeds. Long-horned beetles also bore into the cones helping to dry them and allowing seed dispersal. 

Remarkably, one giant Sequoia can support over 150 species of insects – a self sustaining community where aphids feed on foliage and in turn green lacewings eat aphids; robber flies consume lacewings; flycatchers dine on robber flies; and hawks feast on flycatchers.

No other of the more than 80,000 kinds of trees on Earth can be repeatedly struck by 100,000,000 volts of electricity – or a bolt of lightning – and live for another millennia or two, except Sequoia.

Eventually, giant Sequoias loose their feet as soil erodes, with gigantic springtime snow-loads in their crowns, high winds and soggy soils they tumble to their demise. 

I encourage everyone – at least once in their lives – to take your family and make the pilgrimage to visit these noble trees.

See Dr Reese in Sequoia National Park http://www.amazon.com/sequoia-national-park-california-reese/dp/B000K98602/sr=1-1/qid=1168923237/ref=sr_1_1/002-1043420-2182462?ie=UTF8&s=dvd

Save the Honeybees http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6w-Z7XlnHI

Dr Reese Halter is a conservation biologist, public speaker and the founder of the international conservation institute Global Forest Science. His most recent book is The Incomparable Honeybee and the Economics of Pollination http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=The+Incomparable+HoneyBee+reese+halter&x=0&y=0 Contact him through http://DrReese.com

Carbon Sequestration thru Forestry Applied Vernacular Building

White Pine Framing Cedarburg, WI

White Oak Siding Cedarburg, WI

Walnut shingles Cedarburg, WI

Building in rhythm

How glorious a greeting the sun gives the mountains! ~John Muir

The journey through treatment for breast cancer can be terrifying a bit scary…unless you are lucky enough to receive your treatment from one of the terrific doctors at John Muir, like I did two years ago. Today was one of the routine check-ups with my fabulous Radiation Oncologist, Dr Michael Levine.  Dr Levine is not only a great doctor, he is a great man. After examining me, I got to ask him about his recent success in securing the largest financial gift ever given to this health care system. I asked what he would attibute his success to. Now stop for a second….would you ever consider this kind of doctor to be a salesman of any type??? No Joe Girard training for this guy! He never attended, “How to Win Friends and Influence People” with Dale Carnegie…and yet he convinced some generous couple to hand over $10 million (no typo there) to a hospital…receiving nothing in return…except the good feeling of having a positive impact on a community. That’s what I call…SALES! at its finest! I said, “How did you do it?”  Wearing only recycled kleenex  a hospital gown, I listen with great anticipation to hear the ultimate secret.  “Well, he said…as though it were nothing more then shooting a couple of baskets, “it was really a matter of developing a relationship. I have genuinely cared (aka:played tennis, ate fabulous meals together, listened to concerns about politics, celebrated birthdays, drank wine, encouraged) about these people for several years. They have given a few gifts over the years and then I had the opportunity to serve them in a professional capacity….and they chose to give.”  Genuinely caring about people and investing in the relationship…..hmmm, what a novel idea.  It was obvious that he was truly friends first with whomever these giving angels were, before any giving…. the gift was not the focus, merely one of the fruits of a long relationship of caring.

Bravo Dr Levine….I continue to learn from you. Thank you for sharing the wisdom and insight. And thank you for taking such good care of us patients. You are the best!

Who do you care about? Who do you invest in? What can you do to invest in an important relationship today?

Dr Levine invested…and now there will be generations after generations who will be blessed with health because of one friendship.

That’s a legacy.

Said the famed naturalist and conservationist John Muir, “Everybody needs beauty as well as bread.”  This may well be my motto. Anthem. Epitaph.

For reasons I can’t define, my soul hungers for beauty, and I strain every one of my senses to find it even in the remotest places. (A memory comes to mind of attending “driving school” at the local prison–the single most uninspiring place I have ever had the misfortune to visit, which did more than any patriotic zeal ever has to encourage me to be a law-abiding citizen.)  When the tangible disappoints me, I resort to the intangible and often retreat into “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.”  My soul takes flight on sly breezes, I feast my eyes until they ache on the underside of autumn leaves, and when I’m cleaning house I love nothing better than to flourish my duster to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and let the sound soak into the walls themselves.

I have mentioned before that my dreary apartment depresses me, and I can’t afford to live elsewhere. So over the last week, I have begun a campaign: Beauty instead of bread. I’m cleaning, organizing, simplifying, and spending my grocery money on this modest quest for beauty, and in the meanwhile I’m content to live on whatever I can forage from the pantry.  Good plan, hm?  I have managed a few satisfactory improvements, and I would post pictures…except Elinor still has my camera. Sorry!

Perhaps I shall end up in a shabby tenement house, failing at trimming hats. But perhaps at my end there will come someone too late to rescue me, and he will notice a pot of pansies on one window-sill, “and at once conclude that the window must be hers; it was inevitable that he should connect her with the one touch of beauty in the dingy scene.”

And that will be beauty and romance enough for me.

This, as you will have realized, is definitely not my room. But it is a room such as I imagine for myself.

The newest digital collection at the University of the Pacific’s library will excite any John Muir enthusiast. The library has scanned more than 6,500 of his letters and posted them online. The library has also made collections of Muir’s photographs, drawings, and journals  online.

via the Sierra Magazine blog

John Muir standing to the right of Teddy Roosevelt, circa turn of the 20th Century.
Base of Giant Sequioa tree behind these men, circa turn of the 1st Century.

John Muir "at home"

My wife, Jane, and I have recently viewed the six deeply satisfying episodes of Ken Burns’ PBS series–The National Parks: America’s Best Idea. It is, in its essence, an elaborate treatment of John Muir’s warning, “Nothing dollarable is safe.” We recommend it—a truly spiritual experience, one that makes you want to take all your children and grandchildren and, well, everyone who means something to you, and head for primitive nature in the form of our national parks.

As students of the Five-Factor Model of personality, we are always on the lookout for interesting examples of personality traits in action. One of our oft-repeated statements about the dynamics of traits is that opposites need each other. Extraverted sales people need introverted production people. Creative advertisers need nuts-and-bolts market researchers. Assertive negotiators need reticent research staff. It is not so much that opposites attract as that they need each other. Yin and yang, if you please.

In a delightful segment of the television series, Burns introduces you to Stephen Mather (age 47 at the time) and Horace Albright (24 at the time). Mather was the boss of Albright in the Department of the Interior. Both knew John Muir and were passionate about preservation. Burns describes Mather as the idea person (what we call O+ in the Five-Factor Model), while Albright was the executor (what we call O-). Strategist and tactician. Here is a comment by George Hartzog, former Park Service Director:

               “Mather was a great conceptualizer and Horace was a great implementer. They complemented each other like father, like son. I mean, reverse side of the same coin.”

We are not self-sufficient—we need each other. It is hard to do it all ourselves. Let us learn and appreciate the unique differences we all bring to a task.

Barb at Ennis Lake, John Muir Park

Sun is breaking through the morning mist as I arrive at John Muir Park on October 27.  I walk down the hill to what the Muirs called Fountain Lake, now known as Ennis Lake, and see streams of holy light raking the fog-shrouded waters. 

Though no structure remains, I know the Muirs’ farmhouse, built in 1850, was somewhere nearby.  I picture young John getting up on a day like today with the inside of the house about the same temperature as the outside: 34 degrees.  The one stove in the house was only for cooking, according to John’s father, Daniel.

The Scottish family made a farm here in central Wisconsin, their first home in America, when John was 11.  He and his brother attended school in Scotland, but in Wisconsin they were too busy doing farm chores and building a house.  Later, when the land wore out, the family moved to nearby Hickory Hills and John dug a well by hand through 90 feet of soil and stone.  He was almost worked to death, but the land and trees always revived him, as he wrote, remembering, “Young hearts, young leaves, flowers, animals, the winds and the streams and the sparkly lake, all wildly, gladly rejoicing together!”

As the mists lift, so do flocks of small birds, moving from shore grass to lofty treetops all gold and red with autumn leaves.  A marsh hawk flies by and I hear Sand Hill Cranes calling from the Fox River across Highway F.  I’ve come to commune with nature–and the spirit of John Muir.  As offerings, I have two of his favorite foods: bread and apple slices. 

Moving away from the lake, I follow a mowed path.  A section of the Ice Age Trail goes around Ennis Lake, kept up by volunteers in order to highlight the history of the glaciers in Wisconsin.  I go over a hill and down to two spreading oak trees, still hanging onto their leaves.  As the sun brightens the sky, the tan leaves glow as if fresh-baked and buttered.  The trees are so big, surely they were around when young Johnnie Muir was here.  I offer chunks of spelt bread and Fuji apple.  I throw in an almond for good measure.

Driving home, north along Tenth Road, I finally see some Sand Hill Cranes.  There are dozens of them milling about in an open field bordered by corn.  Usually the cranes pair off in separate fields, but at this time of year they gather to prepare for their migrations to Texas or points further south.  They call to each other, a deep chortle like rusty hinges on a creaky door.

With almost no traffic I am free to linger along the side of the road, watching.  Three cranes glide by my car window, sailing along just to stretch their wings.  In the field, two elegant, gray cranes face each other and bow.  One flaps its wings, then the other.  Then there is bobbing all around followed by a minute’s rest.  Then more bobbing and flapping.  It is quite a dance.

I drive home to the cabin, munching the remains of the apple I shared with John Muir and the oak trees.  During his lifetime, Muir helped create national parks such as Yosemite, but he was unable to preserve this patch of land that had been so dear to him as a boy.  He tried, but it wasn’t until 1957 that it became John Muir Memorial Park, where anyone can visit and make their own connections with the natural beauty that helped form a passionate conservationist.

Point Reyes oysters are as famed an institution as the verdant peninsula’s happy cows and incongruous elk, but the succulent bivalves might soon become a thing of legend, at least as far as human palates are concerned. The question is raised: are National Parks meant to prevent the imprint of humans on choice bits of nature or is the goal one of harmonious interaction? The debate, of course, is nothing new; , there has been a sharp divide between the conservationists and the preservationists – those that would see nature safeguarded and efficiently used and those that would see it entirely free from the print of humanity – since the first federal act safeguarded a small patch of wilderness.

These are the issues which pit the spiritual mountain girl against the foodie within me. But, in the end, I think I come down the side of the conservationists – Teddy, I’m with ya. Perhaps this is purely species-ist of me; I might just be siding with my kind. But, if I’m honest, it’s because the places that I find truly beautiful are those that are impossible to use for any sane human purpose. The top of Mt. Dana isn’t suitable for human industry, neither is the plain of jumbo rocks in the heart of Joshua Tree. In the end, if conservation was the universal watchword and sustainable methods of farming, irrigation, ranching, and slaughter were used, there would be more open, untouched land to go around. And the land used for industry wouldn’t look – or be – too bad either.

John Muir Trail

289 Pounds.

In God’s wildness lies the hope of the world—the great fresh unblighted, unredeemed wilderness. The galling harness of civilization drops off, and wounds heal ere we are aware.

-John Muir

I am not a romantic.  I don’t much care for notions of Truth found in the heart or soul.  I tend to hold that it is more important to think than feel.  I cling very tightly to that sort of rationality.  Don’t misunderstand me, I am obsessed with the epistemological problems of just about everything.  I believe that truth is relative and our intellectual tools are socially created.  However, being a creature caught in webs of significance of it’s own making, I think in argument, because arguments are how I was taught to think.

That way lies no peace, I know that.  I am aware of the true believer’s peace that passes understanding.  There is a great comfort in transcendent faith.  There is calm in knowing that there are answers, even if we don’t know them.  Being hardheaded, I’ve chosen to turn my back on certainty and live in doubt.  I look for more questions and shy away from any answers.

Yet I seek peace.  I need calm.  I need to feel small.  As an old professor put it, I need to find my lie.  I find that out of doors.  There I do not need to understand, only appreciate.  There are no arguments to comprehend and debate, there are only the rhythms of a world that cares very little for our small machinations.  In that quietude I find my wounds are healed, ere I am aware.

John Muir

John Muir made that observation long before I did.  He fell in love with what is now Yosemite National Park and the surrounding area and worked his entire life to preserve it.  For all his service, a trail was dedicated to his memory several years after his death.  The John Muir trail runs about 211 miles along the Sierra Nevada mountains in California.

I have never had much desire to see California.  My 23 years in the east have left me with a resolute bias that only my personal experience in Montana seems to escape.  That said, I don’t reckon I could turn away from a place that inspired a man like John Muir.  So, to see what he saw; to let that heal my wounds the way he did seems only reasonable.  Consequently, I plan to hike the John Muir Trail sometime in my life.

Last week I wrote about the Long Trail in Vermont and said that after this week’s John Muir blog I would solicite recommendations for which to make a priority.  So, I have given two arguments, both of which are short on anything but my very personal reasons for wanting to do each trail.  What do you out there think?