#muir pass

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Sometimes words are not necessary . . . Muir Pass

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Muir Pass from Helen Lake on June 20, 2023

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Muir Pass, John Muir Trail, Sequoia-Kings Canyon National Parks, Sierra Nevada Mountains, California, USA. Photo by Van Miller

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John Muir Trail, also The Pacific Crest Trail, near Muir Pass. Seqouia/Kings Canyon National Park, Sierra Nevada Mountains, California, USA. Photo by Van Miller

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Muir

I have found myself recently thinking about the legendary conservationist, John Muir.  I find myself in awe of him and wonder how he  managed to achieve so much -- travel so extensively, write so persuasively, politic and organize so effectively, and still marry and raise a family.  PCT hikers are reminded of his contributions as we climb Muir Pass, skirt Lakes Wanda and Helen, or transit John Muir Wilderness. However, most of us that walk the PCT have but a cursory awareness of Muir’s biography. The more one knows of John Muir, the greater the sense of appreciation you will have for his contributions.

A Brief Biography --  (excerpted from the Sierra Club website, Wikipedia, and biography.com)

At the age of 11, Muir and his family emigrated from Scotland settling in Wisconsin. Muir’s father was reputed to be a harsh disciplinarian demanding long work days from his family. Even in these early years, Muir was developing an interest in the natural world. During this time, Muir’s skills as an inventor emerged (he won prizes at the Wisconsin State Fair in 1860). He made clocks that kept accurate time and created a wondrous device that tipped him out of bed before dawn.

At the age of 22 (1860), he entered the University of Wisconsin. Although he made excellent grades, after three years left Madison to travel the northern United States and Canada, odd-jobbing his way through the yet unspoiled land.

In March 1866, Muir returned to the United States, settling in Indianapolis to work in a wagon wheel factory. He proved valuable to his employers because of his inventiveness in improving the machines and processes. In early-March 1867, an accident changed the course of his life: a tool he was using slipped and struck him in the eye. He was confined to a darkened room for six weeks, worried about whether he would ever regain his sight. When he did, "he saw the world—and his purpose—in a new light". Muir later wrote, "This affliction has driven me to the sweet fields. God has to nearly kill us sometimes, to teach us lessons." From that point on, he determined to "be true to [himself]" and follow his dream of exploration and study of plants.

He walked a thousand miles from Indianapolis to the Gulf of Mexico. He sailed to Cuba, and later to Panama, where he crossed the Isthmus and sailed up the West Coast, landing in San Francisco in March, 1868 (at almost the age of 30). From that moment on, though he would travel around the world, California became his home.

It was California's Sierra Nevada and Yosemite that truly claimed him. In 1868, he walked across the San Joaquin Valley through waist-high wildflowers and into the high country for the first time. Later he would write: "Then it seemed to me the Sierra should be called not the Nevada, or Snowy Range, but the Range of Light...the most divinely beautiful of all the mountain chains I have ever seen." He herded sheep through that first summer and made his home in a small cabin along Yosemite Creek, designing it so that a section of the stream flowed through a corner of the room so he could enjoy the sound of running water. He lived in the cabin for two years.

By 1871 he had found living glaciers in the Sierra and had conceived his then-controversial theory of the glaciation of Yosemite Valley. Because of his knowledge of Yosemite, learned visitors to the area sought him out. Among them was Ralph Waldo Emerson, who after spending one day with Muir offered him a teaching position at Harvard (which Muir declined).

Beginning in 1874, a series of articles by Muir entitled "Studies in the Sierra" launched his successful career as a writer. He left the mountains and lived for awhile in Oakland, California. From there he took many trips, including his first to Alaska in 1879, where he discovered Glacier Bay. In 1880 (now 42), he married Louie Wanda Strentzel and moved to Martinez, California , where they raised their two daughters, Wanda and Helen. Settling down to some measure of domestic life, Muir went into partnership with his father-in-law and managed the family fruit ranch with great success.

The Muir House in Martinez (a long way from a simple cabin in the Sierra)

But ten years of active ranching did not quell Muir's wanderlust. His travels took him to Alaska many more times, to Australia, South America, Africa, Europe, China, Japan, and of course, again and again to his beloved Sierra Nevada. .

In later years he turned more seriously to writing, publishing 300 articles and 10 major books that recounted his travels, expounded his naturalist philosophy, and beckoned everyone to "Climb the mountains and get their good tidings." Muir's love of the high country gave his writings a spiritual quality. His readers, whether they be presidents, congressmen, or plain folks, were inspired and often moved to action by the enthusiasm of Muir's own unbounded love of nature. [Read his “A Wind-Storm in the Forests” in the California volume of The Pacific Crest Trailside Reader which captures that unbounded love wonderfully.]

Through a series of articles appearing in Century magazine, Muir drew attention to the devastation of mountain meadows and forests by sheep and cattle. With the help of Century's associate editor, Robert Underwood Johnson, Muir worked to remedy this destruction. In 1890, due in large part to the efforts of Muir and Johnson, an act of Congress created Yosemite National Park. Muir was also personally involved in the creation of Sequoia , Mount Rainier , Petrified Forest and Grand Canyon national parks. Muir deservedly is often called the "Father of Our National Park System ".

Johnson and others suggested to Muir that an association be formed to protect the newly created Yosemite National Park from the assaults of stockmen and others who would diminish its boundaries. In 1892, Muir and a number of his supporters founded the Sierra Club to, in Muir's words, "do something for wildness and make the mountains glad." Muir served as the Club's president until his death in 1914.

In 1901, Muir published Our National Parks , the book that brought him to the attention of President Theodore Roosevelt. In 1903, Roosevelt visited Muir in Yosemite. There, together, beneath the trees, they laid the foundation of Roosevelt's innovative and notable conservation programs.

Muir and the Sierra Club fought many battles to protect Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada, the most dramatic being the campaign to prevent the damming of the Hetch Hetchy Valley within Yosemite National Park. In 1913, after years of effort, the battle was lost and the valley that Muir likened to Yosemite itself was doomed to become a reservoir to supply the water needs of a growing San Francisco. The following year, after a short illness, Muir died in a Los Angeles hospital after visiting his daughter Wanda.

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Paul Barrett hiked the PCT in 1975, a year when the May 1st snowpack in the Sierra actually exceeded this year’s epic measurements. Paul observed, “Though we had been hiking since mid-April, and had experienced a fair amount of snow at San Jacinto and Baden-Powell, we still became somewhat dispirited as we gazed north from atop Whitney on June 5th.  Would it really be 180 miles of snow hiking to Tuolumne Meadows?  Not quite...we got out of snow when we forded the raging creeks and dropped below 10,000 feet!”  These photos capture some of the challenging conditions they faced.

“We staggered into Tuolumne Meadows on June 21st,” averaging about 11 miles per day.  “Not bad,” Paul quipped, “but we WERE well equipped . . . with cheap snowshoes (didn't work), sturdy walking sticks, and, most importantly, youthful enthusiasm!”   Traffic was light that summer.  It is hard to believe that they encountered only one other person on the trail between Whitney and Tuolumne. “Great memories!..our mettle was tested...but isn't that why we long distance hike? So to today's hikers, as you posthole your way through the Sierra Nevada . . . stay true to yourselves and your abilities..and may the snow diminish and your spirits soar as you create your great memories!!”

(Photos: top - Looking north from Muir Pass, middle left - Crossing Evolution Creek, middle right - Looking north from Mt. Whitney, lower left - gnarly stream crossing, lower center - Scaling the snow chute below Forester Pass, lower right - Paul at the Mexican border)

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A couple of years ago we posted a series of images around the prompt . . . why I love the PCT. As a part of that, I posted my own collage (link below). I find that pictures make the words unnecessary.

Pacific Crest Trailside Reader

Why do I love the PCT? Photos are worth a thousand words . . . and I have scores more photos that capture my love in addition to these. Do

Other people's photos inspire me as well. The set above included as well as the sets we have posted over the past several weeks.

Top right - Mather Pass snowbound. Bottom - Sunset at Muir Pass by Vit Hradecky. Top Left - a Rae Lakes winter scene by Benjamin Newkirk.

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Theodore Solomons – A Father of the JMT (Part 2)

Excerpted from Michael Hoberman, “Jews in the Wilderness”

This post follows the January 27 post that focused on the role that Theodore Solomons played in the shaping of the nation’s best-loved and most spectacular long-distance footpath, the John Muir Trail. The Pacific Crest Trailside Reader: California (2011) includes Solomons own account of the origins of the JMT, “The Beginnings of the John Muir Trail.” This particular story talks about Solommons and Bonner and their naming and exploration of the Evolution Valley and Lakes and the pass that would eventually be named for John Muir.

What Theodore Solomons experienced and found in 1895, besides eventually yielding the information that enabled Joe LeConte to find Muir Pass in 1908, merits retelling and commemoration. Well ahead of the freak July snowstorm that drove them off the side of Mount Goddard, he and his companion had already become the first recorded Sierra travelers to enter an area that, in an expression of his enthusiasm for the scientific developments of the day, Solomons decided to call the Evolution Basin. Two days out from Jackass Meadows, they found themselves ascending a steep tributary gorge of the South Fork San Joaquin that, as Solomons would write in his trail report of 1896, contained more water than its narrow volume seemed capable of holding. “Swelled by the fast-melting snows of its high sources,” Solomons explained, “the stream hurled itself with torrential force over a series of falls and cascades the most striking and magnificent I have yet encountered in the Sierra.” At the top of the thousand-foot climb along the waterfalls lay a several-mile-long stretch of pristine and forest-fringed meadow whose beauty rivaled that of Yosemite’s famous Tuolumne Valley. Solomons called it “one of the fairest paradises of the nowhere unlovely western slope of the Sierra.” He marveled at the fact that its “difficulty of approach” had kept it from being overrun by the hundreds of thousands of grazing sheep that John Muir, a decade earlier, had famously referred to as “hoofed locusts.”

At the southeastern edge of what we now know as Evolution Meadow, Solomons and Bonner encountered and ascended another gorge. As he first described it in his 1896 report, Solomons referred to it generically as the Middle Fork of the San Joaquin; later, he named it Evolution Creek. As the two men continued to climb the gorge in a southeasterly direction, they saw a “peaked and pinnacled wall” to their immediate south whose looming elevation above them (they were already well above 10,000 feet) ranged between 1,500 and 3,000 feet. Those imposing summits, he wrote, deserved to be thought of as “beautiful monuments rather than mountain peaks.” In the days following his and Bonner’s failed attempt to surmount the Goddard Divide, Solomons named each of them after his scientific and scholarly heroes: Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley, Herbert Spencer, Alfred Wallace, Ernst Haeckel, and the philosopher John Fiske. These men, as Solomons wrote in his 1940 retrospective (included in the 2011 Pacific Crest Trailside Reader: California), had been so “at-one in their devotion to the sublime in Nature” that only these massive rock towers could suffice to monumentalize their legacy.

I sat on my unsaddled bronco facing east and gazing in utter fascination at the most beautiful and the most mysterious sight I had ever seen.

At the base of these heights lay an additional, albeit less intimidating wonder. Hikers all up and down the John Muir Trail still speak of this “fine sheet of water,” as Solomons described it, in reverential tones, whether or not they have heard of the explorer who named it Evolution Lake. These days, every evening from late June to early September its northern end is dotted with multicolored tents. As many as two dozen backpackers bask on its rocky shore, hydrating their meals with water that they’ve fetched out of its frigid depth.

Solomons knew that Evolution Lake was a place of signal importance and also of contradictory implications. “Nowhere more generous is the recompense that awaits the wearied traveler” to its shores, he wrote, highlighting its refugelike qualities. At the same time, he also intuited a profound connection between its apparent isolation and the extreme density that characterized the population centers of his home state of California. “Such is the birthplace of the San Joaquin,” he wrote, “the origin of that river which turns a hundred mills, irrigates a million acres of grain, fruit, and vine, and which imparts fertility and beauty to the largest and richest of California’s valleys.”

Snow Tunnel, Enchanted Gorge, Sierra Nevada photographs / Taken by Theodore Seixas Solomons

At the end of the day on which they’d visited Evolution Lake, Solomons and Bonner camped at the foot of the peak that he’d just named Mount Huxley. They didn’t realize it at the time, but this particular campsite lay within 2 miles of the pass they were seeking. Indeed, as Solomons slept, he dreamed that his “task was fully done.”

Was he also imagining the backpackers who would eventually converge there? In his dream, “A well-marked trail led from the distant Yosemite past the long lake, up the snow-basin, and over the divide to the King’s River.” It was one thing to have been a teenager fantasizing from the lowland safety of his uncle’s pasture about an imaginary trail passing along the crest of the Sierras’ “flashing teeth.” It was another to picture the future trail at a moment when he was several days into a journey along the mountains’ spine, at such an enormous remove from the slightest reminder of civilization. Solomons “hope[d] that his dream was prophetic.” He knew that “the way was clear” and that “only the trail wait[ed] to be built.”

The snowstorm came the following day, as Solomons and Bonner climbed and then descended Mount Goddard in their attempt to locate the pass he’d just dreamed about. The gorge in which they sought and found shelter and warmth over the course of the next several days would prove to be a dead end of sorts, but few dead ends in the world can possibly have been so densely packed with scenic features. Traveling headlong down the south side of the mountain, they entered an area that remains trailless to this day. Solomons called it the Enchanted Gorge. In the words of a hiker who visited it in 1996, it still qualifies as “one of the most remote canyons in the Sierra Nevada.”

The Enchanted Gorge, as Solomons first described it, “was guarded by a nearly frozen lake, whose sheer ice-smoothed walls arose on either side, up and up, seemingly into the very sky, their crowns two sharp black peaks of most majestic form.” He called the peaks Scylla and Charybdis. After gingerly making their way around the edge of the lake, the travelers followed a snow-choked “road” through the gorge, descending “as though into the bowels of the earth,” all the while glancing upward at “black, glinting, [and] weird” walls whose 2,000-foot summits they could barely see. Solomons captured the otherworldliness of the gorge in the photographs he took while there. Two of his most striking images, “Rotunda in the Enchanted Gorge” and “Snow Tunnel in the Enchanted Gorge,” relay the beauty and desolation of the place in stark detail—the thick cover of snow, the jagged rocks, the indifferent sky, and nary a sign of vegetation even in the far distance, let alone of animal or human presence of any kind.

For all of its wonders, the journey into the Enchanted Gorge was not bringing them any closer to a crossing of the Goddard Divide, but they weren’t aware of that fact yet. On their southwestern trajectory out of the wilderness, Solomons and Bonner entered another deep valley formed by the Middle Fork of the Kings River called the Tehipite (fittingly, today’s Theodore Solomons Trail passes through that area). They exited the wilderness at Simpson Meadow on July 28, having logged 200 miles of hiking through places that very few, if any, other human beings, had ever seen.

The Rotunda, Enchanted Gorge, Sierra Nevada photographs / Taken by Theodore Seixas Solomons

In 1896 Solomons made two trips in the region north of the Goddard Divide. The second of the two, during which he successfully led an official Geological Survey party through the territory around mounts Lyell and Ritter and the Minarets that he had first visited and mapped in 1892, would prove to be his final outing in the Sierras for several decades to come, and also the last time he would be either making or following his own path through the mountains.

The most rugged phase of his mountaineering and exploration career lay behind him, however, and his active contributions to the development of the John Muir Trail had come to an end. In the deliberations that took place between its official commissioning in 1915 and the completion of its final portion in 1938, Solomons weighed in freely but commanded little authority.

Epilogue

John Muir’s reputation has come under renewed scrutiny owing to his alleged ties to a prominent eugenicist and his numerous disparaging comments regarding Chinese immigrants and American Indians. It is an appropriate time to revisit the mountains’ cultural significance and the trail’s namesake’s history. In 2018 a movement to rename the John Muir Trail the Nüümü Poyo, or “People’s Road,” arose among certain advocates for tribal rights who wished to draw attention to the Sierras’ Native American heritage. The Kern Kaweah chapter of the Sierra Club drafted a refutation of this proposal, albeit in as culturally sensitive a manner as they could muster. The report gave perfunctory attention to Solomons’ and other Sierra explorers’ roles in helping to create the trail in order to make its wider case in favor of honoring precedent. Why rename the trail, the authors of the report asked, when it was already, by definition, a memorial—“a human-constructed asset”—and not a natural feature like a mountain or a lake?