John Muir’s Yosemite

John Muir’s Description of Yosemite

The walls of these park valleys of the Yosemite kind are made up of rocks mountains in size, partly separated from each other by narrow gorges and side canyons; and they are so sheer in front, and so compactly built together on a level floor, that, comprehensively seen, the parks they enclose look like immense halls or temples lighted from above. Every rock seems to glow with life. Some lean back in majestic repose; others, absolutely sheer, or nearly so, for thousands of feet, advance their brows in thoughtful attitudes beyond their companions, giving welcome to storms and calms alike, seemingly conscious, but heedless of everything going on about them, awful in stern majesty, types of permanence, yet associated with beauty of the frailest and most fleeting forms; their feet set in pine-groves and gay emerald meadows, their brows in the sky; bathed in light, bathed in floods of singing water while snow-clouds, avalanches, and the winds shine, and surge, and wreathe around them as the years go by, as if in these mountain mansions Nature has taken pains to gather her choicest treasures to draw her lovers into close and confiding communion with her.

from John Muir’s The Mountains of California, p.3.
Published by Penguin Books (1989).