The Year of John Muir

The coast at Dunbar where John Muir first explored the outdoors

With the official opening of the John Muir Way last weekend as part of the John Muir Festival and much attention being paid to John Muir in the media (even an editorial in The Guardian) here's my contribution - a piece I wrote for The Great Outdoors earlier this year. The John Muir Way was opened by Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond. Hopefully he will heed the words of Muir and protect Scotland's remaining wild land. Otherwise this gesture is meaningless. 

This year is the centenary of the death of John Muir, arguably the most influential defender of wild places ever and whose legacy is still relevant and important today. Born in Dunbar in Scotland, Muir emigrated to the USA when he was eleven and lived there the rest of his life. He's still not that well-known in Britain, unlike the USA, where he is regarded as the 'father of National Parks'. In Martinez in California where he settled there are John Muir roads and businesses and the house where he lived is now the John Muir National Historic Site. The Sierra Club, which Muir founded in 1892, is one of the USA's leading conservation organisations and does much to keep Muir's memory alive. Scotland is slowly catching up with John Muir's Birthplace, a statue of the young Muir and the John Muir Country Park in Dunbar plus now the John Muir Way. And of course there is the John Muir Trust, founded in 1983 to campaign for wild land.

I discovered Muir many years ago, not with a sudden revelation but slowly as I came across the name again and again and he seeped into my consciousness. I didn't really pay him much attention though until I hiked the Pacific Crest Trail, which in the High Sierra in California runs through the John Muir Wilderness and follows the John Muir Trail (which must be one of the most beautiful backpacking routes in the world). Just who was this John Muir who was so clearly important I wondered.  From signs and leaflets and talking to other hikers I began to learn a little about the man. A few years later I came across a second-hand copy of The Mountains of California (books by Muir were hard to find in the 1980s) and began to read Muir's own words. Immediately I was taken with his passion and devotion to nature and wild places. I went on to read his other works, some several times. The language can be flowery for modern tastes in places but his eye for detail and his love of everything natural shine through. (I'd recommend My First Summer In The Sierra as a first book to read - all of them are available on the Sierra Club website). I also read books about Muir, wanting to know more about this iconic figure. I think the best of these is Michael P. Cohen's The Pathless Way: John Muir and American Wilderness, which goes more deeply into Muir's dilemmas and contradictions than other biographies.

Muir is to be admired not just as a conservationist, not just for his love of nature, key though these are to his greatness, but also for his outdoor adventures and experiences. Long before any of the equipment we take for granted, or the guidebooks, maps and paths, Muir would head off into the wilderness on long solo treks and climbs. From a boy scrambling on the cliffs and castle walls of Dunbar to the adult mountaineer making a daring first ascent of Mount Ritter deep in the High Sierra (a climb described superbly in The Mountains of California) Muir revelled in exploring wild places. He didn't just look at them or study them he went into them - climbing trees in a storm, edging out on narrow ledges to look down a waterfall, climbing rock faces, crossing glaciers, sleeping out wrapped in a coat (his minimal equipment makes today's ultralight backpackers look burdened down). He walked long distances as well - A Thousand-Mile Walk To The Gulf describes his journey from Indianpolis to the Gulf of Mexico in 1867. And when he arrived in California a year later he walked from San Francisco to Yosemite Valley. There followed many trips into the then still little-known Sierra Nevada mountains and in later years further afield, especially Alaska (as told in Travels in Alaska).

Muir was not just concerned for the conservation of wilderness for its own sake and the sake of the animals and plants that lived there. He was also concerned for its conservation for the sake of humanity. He was not a conservationist who wanted to exclude people but one who wanted to share his joy in nature with everyone. He led trips for the Sierra Club and his writing was aimed at encouraging people to visit wild places as well as persuading them they needed protection. He wrote in The Yosemite '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' and in Our National Parks, a book intended to encourage visitors to the parks, 'Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.'

Much will be written and said about John Muir this year. What should be remembered is that his vision of the necessity of wildness and nature is as valid now as it was 100 years ago.

Outdoor Books 2013: My Choices

 

As a voracious reader I get through many books every year.  Some are old favourites - few years pass by without my reading some Colin Fletcher, Edward Abbey or John Muir - whilst some are new to me. Not all are outdoor books - the last year's reading has included works by Neil Gaiman, Patti Smith, Keith Richards, Lucy Mangan, Richard Dawkins, Philip K.Dick and Stanislaw Lem - but it's on those I'm concentrating here. Some are new in 2013, others are ones I've caught up with from previous years.

The sixtieth anniversary of the first ascent of Everest led to a plethora of books about the '53 Expedition of which the most interesting was Everest: The First Ascent by Harriet Pugh Tuckey, deserved winner of the Boardman-Tasker Award for Mountain Literature, which tells the story of her father, Griffiths Pugh, and his previously little-acknowledged yet essential scientific work. I also enjoyed Mick Conefrey's detailed Everest 1953: The First Ascent to the Roof of the World , a more straightforward account.

Many books are read during evenings in camp. The long hours of darkness in winter and the storms of summer both gave opportunities for reading. Until recently the weight of books mattered - not something most readers think about! However e-readers have changed all that and I can now carry a whole library for less than the weight of an average paperback. Thus I was able to read Wade Davis's massive Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest , during my Scottish Watershed walk. This looks at the effect of the First World War on the Everest climbers of the 1920s and describes those early expeditions in fascinating detail. Filling in some of the gap between the 1920s and 1953 is Jim Perrin's Shipton & Tilman: The Great Decade of Himalayan Exploration, which tells, in Perrin's usual lucid prose, the story of the pioneering expeditions of those two maverick mountaineers.

A final Himalayan book I haven't yet read but which is sitting waiting is Alan Hinkes' 8000 Metres: Climbing the World's Highest Mountains: All 14 Summits, a beautiful book with dramatic and mouth-watering photos. That'll be a pleasure for next year.

Also based in mountaineering history though on a much lighter note and taking huge liberties with facts are the novels of Alex Roddie. The Only Genuine Jones is about O.G.Jones and Aleister Crowley's mountaineering rivalry in the 1890s and can only be described as a rollicking good yarn. Crowley's Rival, a longish short story, jumps back a few years and moves from the Alps to the British hills to tell the story of how the rivalry began.

Purely factual but no less entertaining or readable is the second revised edition of one of the indispensible books on the history of the Scottish hills, Ian R.Mitchell's Scotland's Mountains Before The Mountaineers. I read this when it first came out and was very impressed. Reading it again only confirmed my feelings.

Also about the Scottish hills is Max Landsberg's The Call of the Mountains: Sights and Inspirations from a Journey of a Thousand Miles Across Scotland's Munro Ranges, which I reviewed here.

Two very different books on current mountain adventures are Graham Forbes's Rock and Roll Mountains and Andy Kirkpatrick's Cold Wars: Climbing the Line between Risk and Reality. I'd been meaning to read Forbe's book for several years, especially after I became 'friends' with the author on Facebook and we started a series of exchanges on music, outdoor conservation and politics that is still continuing. Although we'd never met I felt as though we had and I was pleased I liked Rock and Roll Mountains, which tells the story of the author's discovery of the pleasures of mountaineering after a life as a musician. Indeed, I liked it enough to read Forbes's following books, Rock and Roll Tourist and Rock and Roll Busker, which are also good but without the outdoors content. Where Graham Forbes's shows how the mountains became a healthy refuge from a rock and roll lifestyle Andy Kirkpatrick's book is the opposite. In Cold Wars it is the mountains that are the danger, a danger that draws the author back again and again to undertake terrifying and seemingly impossible climbs in the most horrendous winter conditions despite his worries about responsibilities to his family. Parts of the book had me shuddering at the discomfort involved. Others had me gripped and tense. Away from the mountains and into mostly gentler terrain is Robert Macfarlane's The Old Ways: A Journey On Foot, in which the author explores ancient tracks and pathways (and sea routes) from Britain to Palestine.

Perhaps the most important books I read this year were those concerned with the conservation of wild places: George Monbiot's Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea and Human Life (which I wrote about here); and Jim Crumley's The Last Wolf and The Great Wood. I'd recommend all three to anyone concerned about nature and wildness. Both authors mix together personal experiences with opinion and fact to provide powerful and compelling books. Also with conservation as a theme but wider in scope are Peter Wright's Nature's Peace: A Celebration of Scotland's Watershed (as one of the photographers with pictures in the book I attended the launch as described here) and Clifton Bain's The Ancient Pinewoods of Scotland: A Traveller's Guide, which I reviewed here. I also reread Peter Wright's first book about the Scottish Watershed, Ribbon of Wildness, as this accompanied me on my walk.

Guidebooks are not usually volumes read cover to cover but rather reference books to be dipped into for information or inspiration. Three new ones this year I did read straight through however. The first was Cameron McNeish's Scotland End to End: Walking the Scottish National Trail, which is an account of the author's own walk as well as a guide. Still in Scotland was Kellan MacInnes Caleb's List, which is a mixture of personal story, history and guide book and which I wrote about here. The last guidebook was one to which I contributed a chapter: Trekking in the Himalaya, edited by Kev Reynolds. Reading the stories of other treks and looking at the glorious pictures has really made me want to go back to the Himalayas. Maybe next year ....

One long distance walk I've never done (though I've read that I have a few times!) is the Appalachian Trail in the Eastern USA. I did though read The Appalachian Trail: Celebrating America's Hiking Trail by Brian B.King, a monumental and beautifully illustrated history of the trail that shows just how much work is required to establish and maintain such a long distance route. The same work was required for the Pacific Crest Trail in the Western USA, which I have walked and which I am writing a book about for Sandstone Press. As part of my research for this book I've been reading other accounts, partly as I want to recommend ones I've enjoyed and also to gain a feeling for the changes in the thirty plus years since my hike. Two very different PCT stories I read and enjoyed were Cheryl Strayed's Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, undoubtedly the most popular hiking account since Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods, and Keith Foskett's The Last Englishman: Hiking 2650 Miles on the Pacific Crest Trail.

Wilderness Walking, Wilderness Writing at the Portobello Book Festival

Next Saturday, October 5th, I'm talking about my writing at the Portobello Book Festival in Edinburgh. The event is from 3 to 4.30pm at the Old Parish Church in Portobello. I'll be appearing with Kellan MacInnes, who will be talking about his book Caleb's List, which I reviewed here. I'll be reading passage from Grizzly Bears and Razor Clams.

Colin Fletcher Revisited

A few years ago I heard that a hiker who had access to the late Colin Fletcher's notes and journals was planning to follow the route Fletcher took the length of Califormia back in 1958, a journey described in The Thousand-Mile Summer. That was the book that inspired me to visit the American West and hike the Pacific Crest Trail. It is still one of my favourite backpacking books and Colin Fletcher is still my favourite backpacking author so I was very interested to hear that someone was to attempt the same hike. It's 54 years since Fletcher set off up California but his story of the walk is as fresh and inspiring today as it was then.

However I'd forgotten about this plan to follow Fletcher's route until a few days ago when I was pleased to read a Tweet from @Lighthiker (Roman Ackl) that said the hiker, Andreas Cohrs, had completed the walk. Lighthiker also gave a link to Cohrs book on the walk California Serendipity – The Thousand-Mile Summer Revisited, which has just been published. Following the link I was delighted to find a site about Colin Fletcher with much biographical information and interesting information. From the site I ordered Andreas Cohr's book, which I am very much looking forward to reading.

I've written about Colin Fletcher before. For more on my thoughts here's a link to a piece I wrote for TGO magazine in 2007 and then posted on this blog the next year. Shortly after I wrote it I heard that he had died so this became my obituary for him. It's called Colin Fletcher The Man Who Walked Through Time.

Visionaries of the Wild

This piece first appeared in the December 2007 issue of TGO magazine. I was reminded of it while rereading Hamish’s Mountain Walk (see last post). I think I should have included Hamish Brown in the article.

“Love of the wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyond reach; it is also an expression of loyalty to the earth which bore us and sustains us, the only home we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever need - if only we had eyes to see”.

Edward Abbey Desert Solitaire


Abbey’s “eyes to see” can be found in the words of writers on wilderness and landscape, including Abbey himself. These “visionaries of the wild” are walkers, climbers, thinkers and philosophers who set out to inspire and educate with their love of the wild, and who, to a great extent, have built our view of the nature and value of landscape and wild places. I’ve been inspired by these writers for many years and re-read their works regularly, often lying in a tent or under the stars far from the noise of roads or the bright lights of the city.

There are writings on wilderness going back thousands of years but our modern visionaries really begin around two hundred years ago with the Romantic Poets, especially Wordsworth, who greatly shaped the way we see the landscape of the Lake District. British poets continued to write about landscape (Ted Hughes being the best late twentieth century example) and it appears as a backdrop in many novels. Direct, non-fiction British writings on landscape are rare though and it is to the USA we have to look to find an ongoing tradition of wilderness writing

The first major figure is this movement for wilderness is Henry David Thoreau in the mid-nineteenth century, living and writing beside Walden Pond in Massachusetts and exploring the forests and rivers of the North-Eastern States. Thoreau put forward the idea that “it would be well perhaps if we were to spend more of our days and nights without any obstruction between us and the celestial bodies” and, most famously, “in Wildness is the preservation of the world”. Thoreau saw human beings as part of nature not apart from it and wilderness as having great value to humans, the beginning of a revolution in thinking about wild places. Although most noted for his contemplative sojourn at Walden Pond Thoreau also saw the value of walking. Indeed, in his essay entitled Walking, he wrote “I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least--and it is commonly more than that--sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements”.

Six years after Thoreau died in 1862 John Muir, an immigrant from Scotland, arrived in the Sierra Nevada mountains in California, a seminal event in the history of landscape and wilderness preservation. Whilst Thoreau had bemoaned the destruction of nature he did little to prevent it. Muir however used the power of words to describe, praise and defend the great landscapes of the Western USA, especially the Sierra Nevada. Muir was a long distance walker who walked a thousand miles from Indianapolis to the Gulf of Mexico by the “wildest, leafiest, and least trodden way”, a mountaineer who made many first ascents in the Sierra Nevada, a scientist who showed that glaciers had carved the landscape of the Sierra Nevada and a campaigner who founded the Sierra Club, a major US conservation organisation, and wrote articles that led to the creation of Yosemite National Park. Muir wrote a vast number of books and articles (not all of them worth reading!) from which many quotations are regularly pulled, perhaps most often, “do something for wildness and make the mountains glad". Muir revelled in every aspect of wilderness, climbing trees in storms to experience them swaying from side to side, edging out to the brink of waterfalls to feel the shaking of the ground and the roar of the water and sleeping out on snowy mountain sides with just a coat to cover him. One of my favourite quotes, which I try to remember as more rain sweeps across the Highlands, is “when I heard the storm and looked out I made haste to join it; for many of Nature’s finest lessons are to be found in her storms, and if careful to keep in right relations with them, we may go safely abroad with them, rejoicing in the grandeur and beauty of their works and ways”.

After Muir a succession of American writers wrote in praise of wilderness, the most significant of which in the first half of the twentieth century was Aldo Leopold, an ecologist and forester and founder of The Wilderness Society. Leopold developed the ideas of an “ecological conscience” and a “land ethic”, now major parts of current environmental thinking, writing that “conservation is a state of harmony between men and land” and “we abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect”. Leopold saw wild land as being necessary for human beings saying “wilderness areas are first of all a series of sanctuaries for the primitive arts of wilderness travel, especially canoeing and packing” in his classic book A Sand County Almanac.

At the same time as Leopold was writing A Sand County Almanac a Scottish climber by the name of W.H.Murray was writing an equally important book called Mountaineering in Scotland, a book written twice in prison of war camps, the first version being destroyed by guards. Through the 1930s Murray had made many first ascents on rock and ice in the Scottish Highlands and was one of the premier mountaineers of the time. However his climbing came out of a joy in wildness and his book is packed with wonderful descriptions of the mountains and the effect they had on him. After a night-time winter ascent of Buachaille Etive Mor he wrote “We had set out in search of adventure; and we had found beauty. Thus we had found both in their fuller sense; for in the architecture of hill and sky, as in great art and music, there is an everlasting harmony with which our own being had this night been made one. What more may we fairly ask of mountains?” Realising that his beloved Highlands were threatened by development Murray became an active conservation campaigner, his greatest victory, for which we should be very thankful, being the prevention of a hydro-electric scheme in Glen Nevis. Of industrial developments in the Highlands he wrote in Scotland’s Mountains that “they could invariably be sited elsewhere than the regions of outstanding landscape quality; sometimes at a greater cost in money, which civilized man should be prepared to pay” and lamented that “to find a wholly wild scene, unmarked by man’s building, one has to go ever farther into the hills”. That was written over twenty years ago. It is even truer today.

Much of Murray’s prose is evocative, romantic and emotional. In this he is more in accord with American wilderness writers such as John Muir or Edward Abbey than most British outdoor writers. And here I think lies one reason for the lack of passion about wild land, the lack of a tradition of landscape writing. British writers tend to be more detached, more cool about their subjects, more reticent about their feelings, which results in work that may be descriptive and informative but which isn’t inspiring or visionary, which lacks intensity. British writers can be divided, crudely, into two camps: nature writers and adventure writers. The former give intricate accounts of plants and wildlife, the latter factual descriptions of climbs and long walks. Neither usually presents a vision of wildness. Some nature writers, like Gavin Maxwell, approach this but none succeed like Murray or the Americans. Adventure writers still tend towards the cliché of the stiff-upper lip, eschewing feelings towards beauty or the wonder of wild places.

In the USA the 1960s saw the emergence of two very different writers who have been a major influence on wilderness thinking and wilderness travel: Colin Fletcher and Edward Abbey. Fletcher is the walkers’ writer, the backpacker who wrote about walking 1,000 miles through desert and mountain in California and for two months solo along the Grand Canyon. No one has captured the spirit of what it is like to walk and camp in a wild landscape better than Colin Fletcher. Here he is on his 1,000 mile walk: “High above the West Walker River, I climbed the final snowbank into a 10,000 foot pass …… Beyond the snowbank the mountainside dropped away again. And there below me lay the valley of the Silver King. Timbered slopes plunged down to a twisting V that held the creek. Two miles downstream, a meadow showed emerald green. Beyond, peak after Sierra peak stretched away northward to the horizon. There was no sign that man’s hand had touched a single leaf or a single blade of grass”. Whilst not a major campaigner Fletcher does make it clear that we have a responsibility to preserve wilderness. At the time he walked through the Grand Canyon this amazing cleft in the earth was threatened with being dammed and flooded. Horrified by this Fletcher wrote that it was “vandalism” and that we had “to shield from the blind fury of material ‘progress’ a work of time that is unique on the surface of our earth”, finishing “and we shall be judged you and I, by what we did or failed to do.”

The same year that Fletcher’s account of his walk through the Grand Canyon, The Man Who Walked Through Time, was published another book appeared that was to have repercussions for decades to come and introduce the world to the iconoclastic, controversial and distinctive voice of Edward Abbey. For the next 21 years until his death in 1989 Abbey was to be a provocative and challenging writer on wilderness and many other topics. Abbey’s love was for the deserts of the South-West USA where he walked, camped and paddled down rivers. His view of wilderness was that it was essential for human sanity and that preserving it came before anything else, writing “I come more and more to the conclusion that wilderness, in America or anywhere else, is the only thing left that is worth saving” and “Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit.” Fond of disappearing into the desert for days or weeks Abbey noted that “a journey into the wilderness is the freest, cheapest, most nonprivileged of pleasures. Anyone with two legs and the price of a pair of army surplus combat boots may enter”.

Having regretted the lack of a British tradition of writing about wild land and landscape I’ve been delighted recently with a new author Robert Macfarlane. In his book The Wild Places Macfarlane explores the idea of the wild through wild places, large and small, in Britain. Macfarlane walked and slept in his wild places and at times his writing has the same intensity and power as Murray, Fletcher or Abbey. Of a camp on a November walk across Rannoch Moor he writes “we stopped there, for dusk was spreading over the Moor, and pitched a small tent. We lay talking in the dusk: about the ground we had covered, the ground still to go, about the odd mixture of apprehension and awe that the Moor provoked in us both. Our sleeping-place was cupped in a curve of the river, on a miniature flood-plain that the winter spates had carved out and flattened: a shelter in the middle of the Moor’s great space”. Macfarlane ends his book with the important insight for our small, crowded island that wild places don’t have to be vast and that small pockets of wildness exist almost everywhere – “there was as much to be learned in an acre of woodland on a city’s fringe as on the shattered summit of Ben Hope”. And that whilst wild places are under “multiple and severe threats”, these are temporary in the history of our planet and the wild will return – “the ivy will snake back and unrig our flats and terraces” – an image that reminded me of The Handsome Family’s wonderful song Peace In The Valley Again, which contains the lines:

Empty shelves will swarm with bees,
cash machines will sprout weeds,
lizards will crawl through the parking lot
as birds fly around empty shops.

Somehow I find these sentiments comforting and optimistic. Edward Abbey would agree.

Visionary writers on the wild are important, especially when we are far from wild places, both physically and spiritually. Read these authors, relish their words, turn over their ideas in your mind, let their visions inspire you. But above all go out into the wild and let it envelop you as it did them.


Suggested Reading

Henry David Thoreau Walking
John Muir My First Summer In The Sierra
Aldo Leopold A Sand County Almanac
W.H.Murray Mountaineering in Scotland
Edward Abbey Desert Solitaire
Colin Fletcher The Man Who Walked Through Time
Robert Macfarlane The Wild Places

Book Review: In The Presence of Grizzlies by Doug and Andrea Peacock

Hiking in grizzly bear country is always an adventure. Just knowing there is a predator out there that is bigger and stronger than you adds an edge to a trip, even though the likelihood of a dangerous encounter is extremely remote. I’ve hiked thousands of miles solo in grizzly country and only ever seen three bears, though I’ve seen plenty of bear sign (and reacted accordingly). Two of the bears were spotted at a distance (one of the reasons I carry mini binoculars – is that a tree stump or a bear on the far side of the meadow?) so I changed my route without going near them. Just one bear was relatively close – a few hundred feet away, which seems no distance with a grizzly bear – and coming towards me. Nothing dramatic happened. I made a noise. The bear sniffed the air, changed direction and disappeared into some willow thickets, leaving me feeling elated and scared at the same time and privileged at seeing the bear wild and free in its wilderness home.

There are many books about grizzlies. Too often they paint the bears as killers and monsters and humans as victims and heroes and have little to do with the true nature of bears. The books of Doug Peacock are an exception. For many years Peacock spent months at a time living alone in grizzly country studying and filming the bears. His first book, Grizzly Years, tells the story of those trips and is one of the best natural history and wilderness adventure books I have read. In The Presence of Grizzlies, written in conjunction with his wife, journalist Andrea Peacock, looks at the relationship between human beings and grizzly bears and why it is of value and why the continuing presence of bears is necessary. The book discusses fear of bears and how to act in grizzly country and has interviews with photographers, hunters, bear keepers, conservationists and others involved with grizzlies, including survivors of attacks by bears. Interspersed with the interviews and facts are fictional stories of individual bears, bases on grizzlies Doug Peacock encountered. These tales are wonderful and whilst of course no one can know how the world looks from the perspective of a grizzly bear or how a bear thinks Peacock can undoubtedly come as close as is possible. His knowledge of the natural history of grizzlies and the pattern of their lives means that the stories fit with how wild bears actually behave.

This is a powerful and moving book, well written, enthralling, enlightening, informative and inspiring. Ignore the sensationalist bear books. This is the one to read to learn about real bears and our relationship with them.

Photo info: Yellowstone National Park is one of the few areas in USA outside of Alaska where grizzlies are still found. Canon EOS 350D, Canon EF-S 18-55mm@28mm, 1/400@F8, ISO 100, raw file converted to JPEG in Lightroom 2.

Book Review: Muir and More: John Muir, his life and walks by Ronald Turnbull

Whilst I was reading A Passion for Nature, which I reviewed in my March 27 post, I went on the backpacking trip described on March 23. Now A Passion for Nature is a fairly hefty book, with 535 pages and a weight of 607 grams, so I didn’t want to add it to my load. As I also didn’t want to be distracted from thinking about John Muir I took instead Ronald Turnbull’s much smaller Muir and More, just 182 pages and 281 grams. Published by Millrace it’s a lovely little book, beautifully produced with high quality paper and proper binding. It’s a joy to hold and needed packing and handling carefully not to be damaged in the rucksack or the tent. It’s well-illustrated too with sketches by Colin Brash. I particularly like the one entitled “John Muir in bivvy”.

The book is based on the author’s walks along the John Muir Trail in California and, much more briefly, the John Muir Way in Scotland. Around these walks the author spins many entertaining tales and anecdotes, jumping from history to geology to traveller’s tales to ecology to literature, sometimes with startling leaps of logic. The author’s style is deceptively informal, almost languid in places and humorous in others, but don’t be fooled. This book contains hidden depths and repays concentration and thought. There is much going on here. Let your mind wander and you may miss the connection with yet another tangent. At one point I was very surprised to find myself reading about hiking in Polish National Parks! I was also surprised to discover an anecdote of my own about bears. The tale as told by Ronald is true and I did walk the Pacific Crest Trail, as he mentions. However the bear episode and the PCT walk took place at a distance of 21 years. (I should point out that I have met the author at various outdoor writers’ events and have corresponded with him by email so this is not a completely detached review though if I hadn’t liked the book I wouldn’t have reviewed it anyway).

Although John Muir and his importance today does appear in the book Ronald Tunrbull himself is an important presence and I suspect readers may finish knowing more about him than Muir. Turnbull’s own message, presented with gentle forcefulness, follows on from Muir “it’s not necessary to do everything. All that’s needed is for everybody to do something ……. Trees and the wilderness are a place to start”. They are indeed and John Muir would of course have agreed.

Book Review: A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir by Donald Worster

I first read John Muir some 25 years ago when I bought a second-hand copy of The Mountains of California. I didn’t know much about Muir then – he was little known in his native Scotland – but my interest had been piqued by walking the John Muir Trail through the High Sierra in California and by the founding a year earlier of the John Muir Trust in Scotland. Since reading that first book I’ve read much more by Muir in the two wonderful volumes edited by Terry Gifford: John Muir The Eight Wilderness-Discovery Books and John Muir His Life and Letters and Other Writings. I’ve also read much about Muir, in particular Frederick Turner’s 1985 biography Rediscovering America: John Muir in His Time and Ours and Michael P.Cohen’s excellent The Pathless Way: John Muir and American Wilderness, an analysis of Muir’s philosophy and how it developed and was expressed in his writing. Now there is a new book about Muir, written by historian Donald Worster. Whilst this is a biography like Turner’s it also examines and analyses the development of Muir’s thoughts and beliefs and looks more critically at his decisions and actions and how his trust in wealthy business friends to always defend wilderness was naive. As such it is more rounded and interesting than Turner’s book. Packed with detail and revealing comments it’s thought-provoking and stimulating. Worster places Muir in the context of his time and shows how he fitted in with the growth of liberal democracy and became part of the American intelligentsia. Muir is a key figure in the development of a wilderness consciousness, the belief that nature is worth preserving and has a value separate from its practical usefulness, so this excellent book about him is worth reading by anyone with the same concerns. (Those of us familiar with Scottish history will have to forgive the author’s surprisingly basic factual errors regarding Mary, Queen of Scots and the Covenanters – I presume that the author, who is a Professor of American History at the University of Kansas, is more accurate regarding American history).

The end of the book discusses Muir’s defeat over Hetch Hetchy, a remote and spectacular valley that was dammed and turned into a reservoir despite being in Yosemite National Park, and the type of attacks made on him by the development lobby, which sound depressingly familiar. Muir and his supporters (many of whom were women) were called soft and effeminate as opposed to hard-headed and practical like the developers. Today they would be called tree-huggers. Destroying nature is still seen by too many as sensible and realistic whilst conservation is for those with their heads in the clouds, day dreamers who don’t understand the necessity of constant exploitation and development. Yet it is the practical nature-destroyers who are the cause of our environmental problems and who may well create an earth unfit for human habitation. The global threat to a natural world with room for human beings (nature will continue with or without us) wasn’t a consideration in Muir’s day but his understanding of why we need wild places is still relevant, as is his belief that having the power to alter nature gives us a responsibility about how we use it. At the end of his book Worster writes “Looking back at the trail he blazed, we must wonder how far we have to go”. A very long way, I suspect, but Muir can still help light us along the way.

Book Review: Wild: An Elemental Journey by Jay Griffiths

Passionate, poetic, political, enraged, sensuous, scholarly, exciting, emotional – Wild is all these and more, a complex mix of experience and learning, personal feelings and hard facts. The author’s elemental journey takes her from the Amazon to Outer Mongolia via the Arctic, the South Seas, the Australian deserts and the forests and mountains of West Papua. She spent seven years travelling and working on this book and the intensity of this slice of her life shines through the writing. This is not a book about landscape, though landscapes feature strongly, nor about wildlife, though this is there as well, but about the nature, meaning and quality of wildness in every sense of the word. Much of the book is about people who still live close to nature, the Inuit in the Arctic, Australian aborigines, the people of the Amazon and West Papua. Griffiths shows great empathy with these people and expresses great rage about what has happened and is happening to many of them when “civilisation” has found them. Sometimes the book seems a political polemic on their behalf. At others it’s a study of the relationship about people and the wild. Then it changes to the author’s powerful personal feelings, whether joyful or miserable. The most uplifting passages are the descriptions of the coral reefs of the South Seas. Here the author seems to have found her paradise as she revels in ecstasy over the profusion and beauty of the sea life. Conversely she has an awful time in the forested mountains of West Papua, admitting when her multi-day trek comes to an end that she looked with love at the vehicle that would drive her away.

Griffiths also delights in language and writes extremely well. There are poetic passages where the sheer flow of words and images conjures up the sensations and places she is describing without the words needing to have any precise meaning. At the same time this is a well-researched book and her knowledge of indigenous peoples and the history of wilderness and exploration is impressive. Combining passion and emotion with scholarliness is not something many writers could do convincingly. In this she reminds me of Edward Abbey, though with a strong feminist perspective. She shares his belief in wilderness as being far more than landscape and wildlife, as being in fact the wellspring of life, essential for sanity and health. Griffiths however is an original writer and not really to be compared with anyone else. Wild is a big book with big themes and huge depths, making it one to read and dip into again and again. There is too much here to grasp in one reading.

Book Review: Grand Obsession, Harvey Butchart and the Exploration of the Grand Canyon by Elias Butler and Tom Myers

Continuing the Colin Fletcher theme of the last couple of posts I’ve been reading an engrossing biography of the man who provided Fletcher with most of the information for his walk the length of the Grand Canyon, mathematics professor Harvey Butchart. At the time of Fletcher’s walk in 1963 Butchart had been exploring the Grand Canyon wilderness on foot for seventeen years and, as Fletcher discovered, was the only expert in this field. When Butchart started hiking there in the late 1940s most of the Grand Canyon was little visited and unknown to walkers. In the past Native Americans, prospectors and explorers had ventured into the Canyon but routes and trails had faded and knowledge of them had been lost. Only a few rim-to-river routes were known and barely any traverses inside the Canyon. In a series of short but intense expeditions, mostly 2-4 days in length, Butchart explored the Canyon systematically, filling in gaps on the map as he covered some 12,000 miles. As well as finding ways down to the Colorado river he climbed many of the massive steep rock buttes that lie inside the Canyon. He kept detailed logs too and published short guidebooks under the title Grand Canyon Treks (now available in a single illustrated volume). All hikers and climbers in the Grand Canyon owe Butchart a huge debt for his efforts, which lie behind all subsequent guidebooks.

Everyone who has hiked in the Grand Canyon away from the maintained corridor route trails will know just how forbidding and serious, with steep cliffs, loose rocks and scree, frequent exposure, scarcity of water, heat and remoteness, it can be even though there are now detailed maps and guidebooks and often other backpackers. For Butchart it really was an exciting unexplored world replete with wonders and dangers and it became the main aim of his life to trace every possible route. A Grand Obsession indeed. In their book Butler and Myers tell the story of Butchart and how the Canyon came to be so important in his life. Canyon hikers and climbers themselves, the authors also set out to follow one of Butchart’s routes, the ascent of Wotan’s Throne (Grand Canyon features often have romantic names that fit the strange and glorious landscape). They used Butchart’s terse and minimalist description (his guidebooks are not the easiest to follow) and it takes them two attempts and gets them into some desperate situations. Interspersing their own adventure with Butchart’s and showing just how difficult hiking and climbing still is in much of the Canyon helps show just how determined, skilled and tough Butchart was.

A key part of the book is about the relationship of Fletcher and Butchart. When Fletcher announced he wanted to hike the Grand Canyon in one long walk Butchart had almost completed a traverse himself, though in a series of short walks spread over many years (Butchart didn’t think that he would like long trips, a few days at a time were enough). Butchart assisted Fletcher with his planning and then completed the last section of the traverse after Fletcher had started out, becoming the first person to do so and leaving Fletcher to become the first person to do so in one continuous walk. After his hike Fletcher and Butchart fell out, why not being clear, as Butler and Myers point out, but it does look as though Fletcher writing a successful and eloquent book about his hike was a major part of the reason, even though Butchart is praised and thanked extensively in it. Also the two men come across as very different in their writing and approach. Fletcher is romantic, expansive and able to express the beauty and wonder of nature and landscape and the joys of backpacking while Butchart is pragmatic and unemotional, describing the Canyon in terms of routes, statistics and physical challenges. Whilst both clearly wanted success Butchart often gives the impression that the achievement of doing new routes and climbs is his main impetus whilst for Fletcher it is the experience itself. Whatever the reasons for their falling out both are now part of the history of the exploration of the Grand Canyon.

Being Grand Canyon enthusiasts themselves means the authors understand just what Butchart achieved and they express this well in the book. For anyone who has hiked in the Grand Canyon (which is the most amazing place I have ever visited) this book tells the story of the pioneer who opened up the way for them. But it’s not just for Grand Canyon hikers. It’s for any outdoors lover who likes stories of adventure and exploration.

Photo info: Wild camping in the Grand Canyon. Photo info: Ricoh RDC-5000, JPEG processed in DxO Optics Pro.

Wilderness Literature Thoughts

Back in December a piece of mine about the wilderness writers who’ve inspired me called Visionaries of the Wild appeared in TGO magazine. I described seven writers in particular, six of them being ones to whom I return constantly and one a new writer who has impressed me. Of these seven, three are American (Henry David Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, Edward Abbey), two ex-pat Brits who moved to and wrote about the USA (John Muir from Scotland and Colin Fletcher from Wales), one Scottish (W.H.Murray) and one English (Robert Macfarlane). In the feature I said that I think Britain lacks a tradition of outdoor prose writing and that our outdoor writers tend to be either nature or adventure writers, few of whom present a vision of wildness. In the February issue of TGO Jim Perrin commented on this piece in his Contemplations column saying that he was “frequently brought up short by how overviews of what we generally term outdoor literature …. almost invariably ignore the riches of our own British version of that writing tradition and celebrate instead an American one”. Jim Perrin goes on to list British writers he thinks should be considered - George Borrow, Richard Jeffries, Edward Thomas, Seton Gordon, W.H. Murray, Robert Lloyd Praeger, Harry Griffin, Tom Weir, Bill Condry, Jim Crumley, Hamish Brown, Nan Shepherd and John Wyatt - and says “before we reach judgements on outdoor literature, we need to make sure we’re well-versed in all those writers and a whole host more”. Now I was not making judgements nor commenting on the whole range of outdoor literature but my views were based on having read all the writers Jim mentioned bar one (Jaeger, of whom I had never heard), plus many more (what about Gavin Maxwell, Showell Styles, John Hillaby?), and not finding them as inspiring on wilderness and landscape as the writers I mentioned (except for W.H.Murray, who I had included anyway). This is not to say that I don’t think these writers are good. Some are excellent. But none present a vision of wilderness and landscape in a big, over-arching sense in the way the writers that inspire me do. Most don’t even try to do this. Seton Gordon for example is a superb writer on Scottish nature, especially birds, and occasionally conjures up wonderful descriptions of Scottish wild land but there’s nothing in his works that I’ve read to compare with Muir or Abbey. Hamish Brown’s Hamish’s Mountain Walk is the best book about a long distance walk in Britain that I know but the author doesn’t have, or try to have, the expansive reach of Colin Fletcher in The Man Who Walked Through Time. Jim mentions the books that have an honoured place on his bookshelf – John Wyatt’s The Shining Levels, Thoreau’s Walden. Now Walden I have no quarrel with but much as I like The Shining Levels it’s not a book I return to often or would place on a level with the other Abbey or Fletcher or Muir (who Jim dislikes intensely).

At the end of his piece Jim touches on Robert Macfarlane’s The Wild Places, though he doesn’t mention it by name, saying that I praised it for its “comforting notion that we can always find wild places in the most surprising places”. Jim says he finds that argument a little complacent and asks if our children will be able to find such places given the pace of destruction of the wild going on. Here I think Jim has misunderstood what I and Robert Macfarlane are saying. The “comforting notion” is not about finding the wild in surprising places. It’s about the fact that the wild will return, that, to quote Macfarlane, “the ivy will snake back and unrig our flats and terraces”. The difference in views is a matter of scale. Jim is thinking on a short, human scale, the next year, decade, generation. Robert Macfarlane is thinking much longer, into the distant future, and in the knowledge that the damage we do now is only a tiny blip in the story of the planet. Not that that’s a reason for doing nothing, for accepting destruction. We live in Jim Perrin’s timescale. Protecting the wilds we have left is for our own sakes as well as our children’s. Jim finishes by saying that “the task of the outdoor writer isn’t just to celebrate wild land but to “protect it passionately, and make us aware of every threat”. I agree and that is something I have always tried to do since I began writing, perhaps not forcefully enough – but then it is all too easy to become preachy and off-putting, shouting loudly but not being heard. Of course writing in defence of wild land isn’t a new task for outdoor writers – it is a main thrust of the work of Aldo Leopold, Edward Abbey and, above all, John Muir, the most effective writer in defence of wild land ever.

The image shows my battered copy of Colin Fletcher’s The Man Who Walked Through Time. It has an honoured place on my book shelves.