The Mountains of California

John Muir’s first book gathers the Sierra Nevada into a portrait of one range seen over years of walking it: the glaciers and the high passes, the snow banners streaming off the summits in winter, the sequoias, the bee pastures of the foothills. Some of the best chapters are the smallest, on the water ouzel that sings all winter beside freezing streams, on the Douglas squirrel, on the day Muir climbed a swaying fir in a windstorm and rode out the gale in its top branches. The reverence is plain and never sentimental, and the case for protection he pressed for the rest of his life grew straight out of pages like these. Free to download as a PDF or EPUB.