"Picturesque California...

[8ballrollin]

and the Region West of the Rocky Mountains, from Alaska to Mexico
(1888-1890)"

I’m planning on a day hike up to Camp Muir in two weeks and became curious about Muir’s connection to Mt Rainier. I found the book with the title listed above fascinating. Beyond editing the book, Muir wrote a section on the Northwest.

Here is an excerpt from a chapter on his ascent of Rainier:

“At noon next day we left camp and began our long climb. We were in light marching order, save one who pluckily determined to carry his camera to the summit. At night, after a long easy climb over wide and smooth fields of ice, we reached a narrow ridge, at an elevation of about ten thousand feet above the sea, on the divide between the glaciers of the Nisqually and the Cowlitz. Here we lay as best we could, waiting for another day, without fire of course, as we were now many miles beyond the timberline and without much to cover us.” - this spot is now Camp Muir.

Muir ends the chapter with the following:

“The view we enjoyed from the summit could hardly be surpassed in sublimity and grandeur; but one feels far from home so high in the sky, so much so that one is inclined to guess that, apart from the acquisition of knowledge and the exhilaration of climbing, more pleasure is to be found at the foot of the mountains than on their tops. Doubly happy, however, is the man to whom lofty mountain tops are within reach, for the lights that shine there illumine all that lies below.”

Here is the hike:
http://www.attrition.ws/index~Hike_R...tanceid~74.cfm

Read Muir’s full account of summiting Rainier here:
http://www.yosemite.ca.us/john_muir_...hapter_20.html

More on the book:
http://www.yosemite.ca.us/john_muir_...ue_california/

Another interesting title by Muir:
“A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf”
http://www.yosemite.ca.us/john_muir_...k_to_the_gulf/