High Sierra Topix

Reading John Muir got me interested in bping. Here is a link to many of his books and articles.

http://www.yosemite.ca.us/john_muir_writings/

Here's another site as well. I especially enjoy reading (and rereading) his journals - you get Muir's more spontaneous responses and an inspiring sense of wonder and joy in just being in a particular place at a particular time. Being able to see the original pages at the University of the Pacific Holt Atherton Special Collections is one of those reasons why I love being alive at a time when those kinds of things that were once locked away in vaults are now digitized and available for all of us.

http://www.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/

Here's the link to the Holt-Atherton digital collection. The drawings, photos & journals are great references, though maybe only for the dedicated. I had checked two years ago and didn't see any of his stuff digitized. Glad you posted this. His handwriting is often indecipherable -- a field journal, after all. Stains of pressed plants on the pages. Extremely cool.

http://library.pacific.edu/ha/digital/index.asp

Trying to see if he noted domestic sheep in some of the places in Kings Canyon he visited. Definitely wrote about bighorn sheep at the lower end of Evolution Valley.

g.

For a little first person on the Muir journals, my friend Howard, who did his dissertation on Muir, and read all his journals, wrote:

I got very good with Muir's handwriting when I went through the journals in 1970 at UOP, as they were being prepared for microfilming or fiching but they were in pencil and occasionally
smeared. The scent was always wonderful and musty--historians must have some sexual receptor for that scent, or maybe it was the librarians assistant I was seeing at the time.

Musty journals as pheromone, who knew?

gdurkee wrote:For a little first person on the Muir journals, my friend Howard, who did his dissertation on Muir, and read all his journals, wrote:

I got very good with Muir's handwriting when I went through the journals in 1970 at UOP, as they were being prepared for microfilming or fiching but they were in pencil and occasionally
smeared. The scent was always wonderful and musty--historians must have some sexual receptor for that scent, or maybe it was the librarians assistant I was seeing at the time.

Musty journals as pheromone, who knew?

LOL!

His 'The Mountains of California' is available as a free downloadable audiobook from Librivox.org.