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This is a great book.but I just love John Muir. I read anything and everything I can get my hands on about his life and adventures. His writing style is so captivating and descriptive.
John Muir is fascinating. also climbed mountains and trees and frozen waterfalls,ect. This book really describes his adventures in detail.I am amazed at the stamina and will of john Muir to go where he went and to do what he did, WOW. Just to hike around Yosemite in the winter is amazing enough, but J.M. He did all this and more back when there was not any modern climbing gear or extra warm cloths or power bars, or camel backs, ect. He truley was a one of a kind mountaineer.
I love his flowery descriptions of meadow flowers and scents of pine in the wind. Muir writes in a gloriously giddy style.
I think having an understanding of who Muir is makes this a better read. The title accurately describes this book as his "greatest adventures".
I read "Muir Nature Writings" before reading "Wild Muir". This book is for those who can relate to this kind of passion.
They were wild. I would describe Muir as extremely passionate about nature and being a part of it.
I enjoy it because nobody writes like that anymore. It reminds me of being "out there" and makes me giddy in remembrance.
We love the stories that take you to John's Adventures.and the Sierra's
The waters still as clear as crystal, teeming still with trout. I felt like I needed a 360 degree camera to capture the beauty of this place, but I don't think anybody makes those these days. The Wild Muir has been on my Amazon wish list for a long time, so glad I bought my copy in the heart of Muir Territory, where one cannot escape some mention of his name in the many trails and areas he regularly trekked through. The first "scootcher" (adventure/daring) told in this book.
Every twist and turn of the trails revealed a new, pristine vista that the best panoramic camera could not capture. Lee Stetson, an actor who regularly has played Muir in Yosemite, compiled these 22 tales in this very readable, short book which I obtained in Tuolumne meadows visitor center in Yosemite National Forest. Muir's "scootchers" began as a child in Dunbar, Scotland, his mountaineering prowess seemingly inbred, though his brother David, seems not to have shared the same level of fearfulness. I imagined it was only a sooty pit with stone walls like those of the castle, and I felt sure there must be chunks and cracks in the masonry for fingers and toes.". Muir expressed these same feelings when he writes: "Pursuing my lonely way down the valley, I turned again and again to gaze on the glorious picture, throwing up my arms to inclose it as in a frame.
In the first chapter, Muir writes of his home, "One of our best playgrounds was the famous Dunbar Castle, to which King Edward fled after his defeat at Bannockburn.The roof of our house, as well as the crags and walls of the old castle, offered fine mountaineering exercise." Of course, Muir would drag his brother David out of their room onto the roof after their mother put them to bed, telling them to "sleep like gude bairns". The other twenty-one scootchers contain similar tales of Muir rescuing others who attempted to follow his paths as well as his own hair-raising scootchers sliding down glaciers, surviving powerful wind storms and earthquakes in Yosemite and elsewhere. What a nice backyard, I constantly repeated to myself while hiking several days at Tuolumne. In the same chapter, he writes that a servant girl would tell them about hell where bad people would go to live eternally. After long ages of growth in the darkness beneath the glaciers, through sunshine and storms, it seemed now to be ready and waiting for the elected artist, like yellow wheat for the reaper; and I could not help wishing that I were that artist.
I had to be content, however, to take it into my soul." It was here in Tuolumne and Yosemite that Muir would gather those who shared his desire to preserve this wilderness area like Theodore Roosevelt and others, and thankfully, they did just that. Muir exclaimed indomitably that "I could climb out of it. It was a real treat to read these adventures in those wild, Muir woods of the Sierras.
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