Part III. The Trip of 1890

XVII. In Camp at Glacier Bay
XVIII. My Sled-Trip on the Muir Glacier
XIX. Auroras

Glossary of Words in the Chinook Jargon



Preface


Forty years ago John Muir wrote to a friend; "I am hopelessly and
forever a mountaineer. . . . Civilization and fever, and all the
morbidness that has been hooted at me, have not dimmed my glacial
eyes, and I care to live only to entice people to look at Nature's
loveliness." How gloriously he fulfilled the promise of his early
manhood! Fame, all unbidden, wore a path to his door, but he always
remained a modest, unspoiled mountaineer. Kindred spirits, the
greatest of his time, sought him out, even in his mountain cabin, and
felt honored by his friendship. Ralph Waldo Emerson urged him to
visit Concord and rest awhile from the strain of his solitary studies
in the Sierra Nevada. But nothing could dislodge him from the glacial
problems of the high Sierra; with passionate interest he kept at his
task. "The grandeur of these forces and their glorious results," he
once wrote, "overpower me and inhabit my whole being. Waking or
sleeping, I have no rest. In dreams I read blurred sheets of glacial
writing, or follow lines of cleavage, or struggle with the
difficulties of some extraordinary rock-form."