My First Summer in the Sierra

JOHN MUIR, bom in Dunbar, Scotland, in 1838, was a writer, explorer, and naturalist, and the founder of the Sierra Club. He receives much of the credit for the preservation of Yosemite Valley and is often called the "Father of Our National Park System." After immigrating with his family to a Wisconsin farm at the age of eleven, he became a wide traveler in his youth, making a celebrated 1,000-mile walk from Indiana to the Florida coast. From there he took a steamer around Cape Horn to San Francisco, where he set off on foot once again, this time with a herd of sheep, for the Sierra Nevada Mountains. From that day forward, he would become an inexhaustible source for the preservation of wilderness in America. He died in 1914.

GRETEL EHRLICH is the author of Facing the Wave, The Future of Ice, Heart Mountain, The Solace of Open Spaces, This Cold Heaven, and Unsolsced, among other works of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. Ehrlich studied at Bennington College and UCLA film school. She divides her time between Montana and Hawaii.