John Muir, otherwise known as “John of the Mountains” and “The Father of National Parks.” is the single most important conservationist and adventurer of the last 200 hundred years. His passion for maintaining nature, as it is, in it’s purest form, was in full display as he petitioned for the National Parks Bill that passed in 1890.
He was one of the earliest advocates of establishing and conserving a National Park system that everyone in America would have the right to enjoy.
What we are left with today is a massive and unique system of parks that are there for everyone to enjoy, no questions asked. With the rapid growth over the last 100 years, John Muir had the vision to preserve and protect the wilderness from unfettered corporate development.
According to the National Park Service, his writings helped establish…
- Yosemite National Park
- Mt. Rainier National Park
- Sequoia National Park
- The Grand Canyon
Keep close to Nature’s heart and break clear away, once in awhile, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.
When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.
The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.
And into the forest I go, to lose my mind and find my soul.
One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.
We are now in the mountains and they are in us, kindling enthusiasm, making every nerve quiver, filling every pore and cell of us.
Of all the paths you take in life, make sure a few of them are dirt.
Trees go wandering forth in all directions with every wind, going and coming like ourselves, traveling with us around the sun two million miles a day, and through space heaven knows how fast and far!
Everybody needs beauty…places to play in and pray in where nature may heal and cheer and give strength to the body and soul alike.
Earth has no sorrow that earth can not heal.
Going to the mountains is going home.
Another glorious day, the air as delicious to the lungs as nectar to the tongue.
How glorious a greeting the sun gives the mountains.
Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity.
We all travel the Milky Way together, trees and men.
Mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life. How glorious a greeting the sun gives the mountains.
How glorious a greeting the sun gives the mountains.
Nothing truly wild is unclean.
I never saw a discontented tree.
One day’s exposure to mountains is better than a cartload of books.
Most people are on the world, not in it.
Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness. All other travel is mere dust and hotels and baggage and chatter.
Climb the mountains and get their good tidings.
I am losing precious days. I am degenerating into a machine for making money. I am learning nothing in this trivial world of men. I must break away and get out into the mountains to learn the news.
When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.
When we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with other stars all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty.
Between every two pines is a doorway to a new world.
These temple destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism, seem to have a perfect contempt for Nature, and, instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the mountains, lift them to the Almighty Dollar.
I am losing precious days. I am degenerating into a machine for making money. I am learning nothing in this trivial world of men. I must break away and get out into the mountains to learn the news.
In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks.
Hidden in the glorious wildness like unmined gold.
I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.
Walk away quietly in any direction and taste the freedom of the mountaineer.
The mountains are calling and I must go.
Take a course in good water and air; and in the eternal youth of Nature you may renew your own. Go quietly, alone; no harm will befall you.
One of the best ways to see tree flowers is to climb the tallest trees.
