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  • Published: 15 September 2001
  • ISBN: 9780375758195
  • Imprint: Random House US Group
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 304
  • RRP: $29.99

The Mountains of California




When John Muir traveled to California in 1868, he found the pristine mountain ranges that would inspire his life’s work. The Mountains of California is the culmination of the ten years Muir spent in the Sierra Nevadas, studying every crag, crook, and valley with great care and contemplation.

Bill McKibben writes in his Introduction that Muir "invents, by sheer force of his love, an entirely new vocabulary and grammar of the wild . . . a language of ecstasy and exuberance."

The Mountains of California is as vibrant and vital today as when it was written over a century ago.

This Modern Library Paperback Classic includes the photographs and line drawings from the original 1898 edition.

  • Published: 15 September 2001
  • ISBN: 9780375758195
  • Imprint: Random House US Group
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 304
  • RRP: $29.99

About the author

John Muir

JOHN MUIR, bom in Dunbar, Scotland, in 1838, was a writer, explorer, and naturalist, and the founder of the Sierra Club. He receives much of the credit for the preservation of Yosemite Valley and is often called the "Father of Our National Park System." After immigrating with his family to a Wisconsin farm at the age of eleven, he became a wide traveler in his youth, making a celebrated 1,000-mile walk from Indiana to the Florida coast. From there he took a steamer around Cape Horn to San Francisco, where he set off on foot once again, this time with a herd of sheep, for the Sierra Nevada Mountains. From that day forward, he would become an inexhaustible source for the preservation of wilderness in America. He died in 1914.

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