The Invention of Nature

As he walked towards the mountains, keeping away from roads and settlements, Muir bathed in colour and air so delicious, he said, that it was ‘sweet enough for the breath of angels’. In the distance the white peaks of the Sierra glistened as if they were made of pure light, ‘like the wall of a celestial city’. When he finally entered Yosemite Valley – some seven miles long – Muir was overwhelmed by the raw wilderness and beauty.

The many tall grey granite rocks that hugged the valley looked spectacular. At almost 5,000 feet Half Dome was the tallest and seemed to watch over the valley like a sentinel. The side that was turned to the valley was a sheer cliff, the other was rounded – a dome cut in half. Equally stunning was El Capitan – with a vertical face that rose a straight 3,000 feet from the valley floor (which itself is 4,000 feet above sea level). It is so steep that scaling El Capitan remains one of the greatest challenges for climbers today. With the perpendicular granite cliffs lining the valley, it gave the impression that someone had cut a swathe through the rocks.

It was the perfect time of the year to arrive in Yosemite Valley, as the melting snows had fed the many waterfalls that tumbled over the rock faces. They seemed to ‘gush direct from the sky’, Muir thought. Here and there rainbows appeared to dance in the spray. Yosemite Falls plunged through a narrow gap almost 2,500 feet deep, making it the tallest waterfall in North America. There were pines in the valley and small lakes that reflected the scenery on their mirrored surfaces.

Competing with this imposing scene were the ancient sequoias (Sequoiadendron giganteum) in Mariposa Grove, some twenty miles south of the valley. Tall, straight and stately, these giants seemed to belong to another world. They were so particular to the place that they could only be found on the western side of the Sierra. Some of the sequoias in Mariposa Grove soared almost 300 feet high and were more than 2,000 years old. The largest single-stemmed trees on earth, they are one of the oldest living things on the planet. Majestic columns with reddish vertically grooved bark and with no lower branches, the older trees extended into the sky and appeared even taller than they were. They were unlike any tree that Muir had ever seen. He was howling at vistas and darting from one sequoia to another.

One moment Muir was lying on his belly with his head just hovering above the ground, parting the grasses of the meadow to see what he called the ‘underworld of mosses’ populated by busy ants and beetles, and the next moment he was trying to understand how Yosemite Valley might have been created. Muir zoomed from the minute to the magnificent. He was seeing nature with Humboldt’s eyes, echoing the way that Humboldt had been drawn to the majestic views across the Andes but had also counted 44,000 flowers in one single cluster of blooms on a tree in the rainforest. Now Muir counted ‘165,913’ flowers blooming in one square yard, as well as delighting in the ‘glowing arch of sky’. The big and the small were woven together.

‘When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe,’ he later wrote in his book My First Summer in the Sierra

. Again and again, Muir returned to this idea. As he wrote of ‘a thousand invisible cords’ and ‘innumerable unbreakable cords’, and of those ‘that cannot be broken’, he mulled over a concept of nature where everything was connected. Every tree, flower, insect, bird, stream or lake seemed to invite him ‘to learn something of its history and relationship’, and the greatest achievements of his first summer in Yosemite, he said, were ‘lessons of unity and inter-relation’.²

Muir was so enchanted by Yosemite that he returned many times and as often as he could over the next few years. Sometimes he stayed for months, other times just weeks. When he was not climbing, walking and observing in the Sierra, he took odd jobs – in the Central Valley, in the foothills of the Sierra or in Yosemite. He worked as a shepherd in the mountains, as a farm hand on a ranch and at a sawmill in Yosemite Valley. One season while he stayed in Yosemite, Muir built himself a small cabin through which a little stream flowed, gurgling a gentle lullaby at night. Ferns grew inside the cabin and frogs hopped along the floor – inside and outside were the same. Whenever he could, Muir disappeared to the mountains, ‘screaming among the peaks’.

In the Sierra the world became more and more visible, Muir said, ‘the farther and higher we go’. He noted and recorded his observations, he drew and collected but he also went to the mountaintops, higher and higher. He climbed from summit to canyon, from canyon to summit, comparing and measuring – assembling data to understand the creation of Yosemite Valley.