My First Summer in the Sierra: with Illustrations - Softcover

Muir, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 194077702X ISBN 13: 9781940777023

Publisher: J Missouri, 2013

Synopsis

In My First Summer in the Sierra John Muir recounts his early travels in the Sierra while working as a shepherd. In the summer of 1869, Muir set out from California’s Central Valley with a flock of 2,050 sheep and made his way to the headwaters of the Merced and Tuolumne Rivers. As one of America’s great philosopher naturalists, Muir captures the spirit of the Sierra Nevada and brings the reader along as a witness to his great journey. He explores in great detail the mountains, meadows, waterfalls, flora, and fauna of the rich landscape that captured his heart. My First Summer in the Sierra is an excellent introduction to the writings of John Muir. This edition contains 30 illustrations."Oh, these vast, calm, measureless mountain days, inciting at once to work and rest ! Days in whose light everything seems equally divine, opening a thousand windows to show us God. Nevermore, however weary, should one faint by the way who gains the blessings of one mountain day ; whatever his fate, long life, short life, stormy or calm, he is rich forever."

About this title

Review:

From the photographer who brought Thoreau's Walden and Cape Cod to life comes a new work combining classic literature with brand-new photography. This time, Scot Miller takes on the seminal work of John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra. The book details Muir's first extended trip to the Sierra Nevada in what is now Yosemite National Park, a landscape that entranced him immediately and had a profound effect on his life. The towering waterfalls, natural rock formations, and abundant plant and animal life helped Muir develop his views of the natural world, views that would eventually lead him to push for the creation of the national parks.

Timed to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the book's original publication by Houghton Mifflin Company, My First Summer in the Sierra is illustrated with Miller's stunning photographs, showcasing the dramatic landscape of the High Sierra plus John Muir's illustrations from the original edition and several previously unpublished illustrations from his 1911 manuscript. The publication of My First Summer in the Sierra inspired many to journey there, and this newly illustrated anniversary edition will surely inspire many more.

This book is being published in collaboration with Yosemite Conservancy and, for each copy sold, Scot Miller is making a donation to Yosemite Conservancy.

A Look Inside My First Summer in the Sierra
(Click on Images to Enlarge)

Sunset ceremony	Summer shower Tuolumne Meadows
Cathedral Peak after the storm	Nevada Fall and Liberty Cap

From the Back Cover:

“Writing, Muir once said, is 'like the life of a glacier, one eternal grind.'  My First Summer in the Sierra, his best and most enduring book, extends the analogy.  Just as the unforgettable granite domes of Yosemite, so impressive, impassive and seemingly impermeable, were molded and shaped by patient glaciation, each journal entry here has been sculpted and polished by the man who considered glaciers proof of 'Nature as a poet, an enthusiastic workingman.'
'Everything in Nature called destruction must be creation, a change from beauty to beauty,' Muir advises us in these pages, distilling what he learned during his life-changing three and a half months in the Sierra. 
In the mountains he called the 'Range of Light,' such insights come more easily, he said, because 
'everything is perfectly clean and pure and full of divine lessons . . . until the hand of God becomes visible.'”
 
from the foreword by
Dayton Duncan and Ken Burns 

About this edition

• Publisher: J Missouri
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 194077702X
• ISBN 13: 9781940777023
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 182