My First Summer in the Sierra [Paperback]

John Muir (Author), Frederick Turner (Foreword)

Book Description

Series: John Muir Library | Publication Date: March 1, 1990

The most popular of John Muir’s works, this volume is an account of his first visit to the High Sierra and the Yosemite. Based on his journal entries for 1869, the text has an immediacy and spontaneity that bring alive the voice and emotions of the young Muir as he relates his humorous, rough-and-tumble adventures as a California shepherd.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

John Muir, a young Scottish immigrant, had not yet become the famed conservationist whom he liked to call "John o' the Mountains" when he first trekked into the foothills of the Sierra Nevada not long after the end of the Civil War. Having caught a glimpse of such magical places as Tuolumne Meadows and El Capitan, Muir ached to return, and in the summer of 1869 he signed on with a crew of shepherds and drove a flock of 2,500 woolly critters toward the headwaters of the Merced River.

The diary he kept while tending sheep forms the heart of My First Summer in the Sierra; published in 1911, it enticed thousands of Americans to visit the Yosemite country. The book is full of the concerns Muir would later voice as America's foremost preservationist and wildlands advocate, which would bear fruit in the creation of several national parks and monuments. And it resounds with Muir's nearly pantheistic regard for the natural world: with celebrations of the Sierra's lizards that "dart about on the hot rocks, swift as dragonflies," its mountain lions and tall trees and fierce thunderstorms and bears; with Muir's overarching awe for places that civilization had yet to tame. Though perhaps a little purple by modern standards, Muir's book continues to inspire readers to seek out such places for themselves and make them their own--and as such it stands among the enduring classics of environmental literature. --Gregory McNamee --This text refers to the Mass Market Paperback edition.

Review

“As more and more of us grow aghast at what we have done to the world we started with, Muir’s reverence and devotion will seem keenly germane, and our regret may be transmuted into a fight for the future.” —Edward Hoagland


From the Trade Paperback edition. --This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 188 pages
• Publisher: Sierra Club Books (March 1, 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0871567482
• ISBN-13: 978-0871567482
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.8 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,537,279 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Quintessential Muir, August 30, 2001

By 

"bcj222" (Newport Beach, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: My First Summer in the Sierra (Classic, Nature, Penguin) (Mass Market Paperback)

In the summer of 1869, John Muir was invited to help herd sheep in summer pasture near Yosemite, California. This book is Muir's diary of his first summer in the Sierra Nevada. In the spirit of an ascetic mystic, Muir recorded his feelings of wonder as he discovered the awesome beauty of the Sierra Nevada. I held my breath and chuckled as Muir described his encounters with the denizens of the woods. "Having heard that a black bear will run from his bad brother man and deciding I would like to see his gait in running, I rushed and shouted at a large cinnamon colored fellow. To my dismay, he did not run. On the contrary, he stood his ground, ready to fight. Then, I suddenly began to fear upon me would fall the work of running." For the reader or nature lover who would like to become more familiar with the father of the conservation movement, this is the book to read.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Discovering the Range of Light, July 17, 2006

By 

K.S.Ziegler (Seattle) - See all my reviews

This review is from: My First Summer in the Sierra (Dover Books on Americana) (Paperback)

John Muir was born in 1838 and at a young age emigrated from Scotland with his family to a Wisconsin farm. He escaped the hard labor of the farm and his father's backward Biblical obsessions by displaying great powers of visualization. From principles learned from books, he whittled and fashioned barometers, thermometers, clocks and other marvels from the barest of materials. But he repudiated his inventive genius, which could have made him rich, after an industrial accident left him temporarily blinded; and he took off for the wilderness to discover plants and the natural world.

This book is a journal account of Muir's finding a place for himself in Yosemite after some dangerous wandering through the hazards of reconstruction in the South after the Civil War. It's a book of discovery. Although flocks of sheep like Muir's employer's were allowed to overrun backcountry meadows, and gold miners had ripped apart the lower river beds, the Sierras then were still a place that had many aspects that had not yet been explored or understood. The backcountry was much more vulnerable to exploitation (though in many ways less endangered) than today, but there was freer and unfettered access for one who sought out it's mysteries and wanted to learn. This book shows Muir's powers of visualization ("the eye within the eye") in his beginning to formulate the role that glaciers play in the formation of the landscape. No one at that time had come to a solid understanding of what had made Yosemite Valley. And, although it might seem quite clear in retrospect, it took a strong mind of one who up until that time had been adrift in the world, a wanderer who studied plants, to visualize his theories and make them known to the world.

Anyone who has not experienced the Sierra first hand cannot really appreciate this book. There are lengthy and numerous descriptions of plants and animals, loving descriptions in Muir's fashion, that can only be understood by one who has reveled in the same places and likewise wants to examine all the details. It's not a purely intellectual appreciation. It's something felt with the whole body, with all the senses alive. Muir always writes of being drawn into Nature, of never turning back, as in the case of his foolhardy venture to the brink of Yosemite Falls, "I therefore concluded not to venture farther, but did nevertheless". There's also this kind of breathless anticipation of tomorrow- if only I will be given a chance to explore its fountains...

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Exuberant. "In full communion with everything good.", January 27, 2005

By 

Wesley L. Janssen (San Diego, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: My First Summer in the Sierra (Classic, Nature, Penguin) (Mass Market Paperback)

This is the third of Muir's books that I have read, the first in several years. Gretel Ehrlich writes in her introduction: "[Muir] wrote: 'I should like to live here always. It is so calm and withdrawn while open to the universe in full communion with everything good.' And in so speaking of the place he loved best, described himself."
In the inimitable way of John Muir, the book is essentially a journal, in this case of his thoughts and travels in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in the summer of 1869. On one day (July 15) he tells of his great desire to look directly down the thousands of vertical feet of Yosemite Falls leading him into a death-defying pilgrimage onto shear rock: "If I was to get down to the brink at all that rough edge, which might offer slight finger-holds, was the only way. But the slope . . . looked dangerously smooth and steep, and the swift roaring flood beneath, overhead, and beside me was very nerve-trying. I therefore concluded not to venture farther, but did nevertheless." I'll guess that Muir is the only person to have ever positioned himself on the lip of this great waterfall. Having earlier read of his mountaineering and storm-reveling experiences, even this is not quite surprising. On another day he writes of encountering a brown bear, a housefly, and a grasshopper, and treats them all as being equally fascinating.

In a later entry, Muir contemplates raindrops with these words:
"How far they have to go, how many cups to fill, great and small, cells too small to be seen, cups holding half a drop as well as lake basins between the hills, each replenished with equal care, every drop in all the blessed throng a silvery newborn star with lake and river, garden and grove, valley and mountain, all that the landscape holds reflected in its crystal depths, God's messenger, angel of love sent on its way with majesty and pomp and display of power that make man's greatest shows ridiculous.
Now the storm is over, the sky is clear, the last rolling thunder-wave is spent on the peaks, and where are the raindrops now -- what has become of all the shining throng? In winged vapor rising some are already hastening back to the sky, some have gone into the plants, creeping through invisible doors into the round rooms of cells, some are locked in crystals of ice, some in rock crystals, some in porous moraines to keep their small springs flowing, some have gone journeying on in the rivers to join the larger raindrop of the ocean. From form to form, beauty to beauty, ever changing, never resting, all are speeded on with love's enthusiasm, singing with the stars the eternal song of creation."

For Muir, the mostly self-educated botanist and geologist, nothing Nature does is anything less than miraculous. Only in our finest moments of insight, revelation if you will, do we see the world as Muir saw it always.
[July 12, 1869] "We saw another party of Yosemite tourists to-day. Somehow most of these travelers seem to care but little for the glorious objects about them, though enough to spend time and money and endure long rides to see the famous valley. And when they are fairly within the mighty walls of the temple and hear the psalms of the falls, they will forget themselves and become devout. Blessed, indeed, should be every pilgrim in these holy mountains!"