Hello, I'm the OUTDOOR PROFESSOR from DiscoveringTheOutdoors.com/
Here's your outdoor tip on who is John Muir. And what does he have to do with the outdoors?
John Muir was one of the first advocates of the national park system. He moved from Scotland to a Wisconsin farm in 1849. His father forced him to memorize the Old and New Testament by age 11. He studied botany and biology at the University of Wisconsin. After being nearly blinded in a factory accident in 1867, he walked from Indiana to Florida making botanical sketches and then sailed to California followed by a walk from San Francisco to the Sierra Nevada’s. During this time he made what he called an unconditional surrender to nature with a spiritual connection. After working as a sheepherder, John took a job in the Yosemite Valley and roamed the area deciding that the valley had been carved by glaciers.
Muir wrote articles for magazines such as Overland Monthly, Scribner’s and Harper’s making him well-known in the United States. After being in the orchard business in California, he traveled to Alaska’s Glacier Bay and Washington’s Mont Rainier bringing national attention to these places with his writing. He championed protection of the Petrified Forest and the Grand Canyon in Arizona. John became the advocate for setting aside the high country around Yosemite Valley as a national park in 1890 as well as for General Grant and Sequoia national parks.
John Muir felt he was a student of the University of the Wilderness and that Yosemite was his graduate course. His one-room cabin made from pine and cedar was by Yosemite Creek with its water running under its floor. Muir loved the sound of water and plants grew through the cabin’s floorboards. He wove together two ferns forming an ornamental arch over his writing desk and he slept on sheepskin blankets over cedar branches. He thought it was like living in a greenhouse with frogs chirping under the floor.
John Muir’s camping trip with President Theodore Roosevelt in 1903 is thought to have persuaded Roosevelt to provide federal protection for Yosemite National Park. In his final crusade, he worked to prevent the city of San Francisco from building a dam and creating a reservoir in Yosemite’s Hetch Hetchy Valley. Muir died a year later on Christmas Eve at age 76. He was one of the founders and the first president of the Sierra Club. The club grew slowly, but steadily, with many tracing its success to Muir’s advice, “Climb the mountains and get their good tidings.” Many see him as the father of the conservation movement.
So John Muir and the outdoors go hand in hand.
This is the OUTDOOR PROFESSOR from DiscoveringTheOutdoors.com/
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References-Additional Reading
Biography
http://ecotopia.org/ecology-hall-of-fame/john-muir/biography/
The National Parks
http://www.pbs.org/nationalparks/people/historical/muir/
John Muirs Yosemite
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/john-muirs-yosemite-10737/?no-ist
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