50 Fun Facts About John Muir

Young inventor John Muir rigged his bed to do what at a set hour each morning?

Tip him onto his feet is what the bed did, and on dark winter mornings it lit a lamp as well. Muir called his wake-up contraption an early-rising machine.

What did John Muir design into the small cabin he built for himself in Yosemite Valley?

A stream flowing inside was the whole idea: Muir led part of Yosemite Creek through a corner of the room so he could hear running water. He lived in the cabin for two years.

During a fierce winter windstorm in the Sierra, John Muir did what to feel the gale more closely?

Climbed a tall tree is right: Muir went up a 100-foot Douglas spruce and clung to its whipping top for hours. He compared himself to a bobolink on a reed.

Which US president camped with John Muir in Yosemite in 1903 and woke under a dusting of fresh snow?

Theodore Roosevelt asked Muir to show him the real Yosemite, and the pair slipped away to sleep in the open near Glacier Point. Three years later Yosemite Valley passed to federal control.

A slipped tool in an Indianapolis wagon-wheel factory temporarily cost John Muir which of his senses?

Sight came back after six weeks in a darkened room, and Muir emerged a changed man. He quit the factory for good and resolved to spend his life studying wild plants.

John Muir spent his first summer in the Sierra herding which animals, later scorned by him as hoofed locusts?

Sheep by the thousand stripped the high meadows bare, and that single season turned their keeper against them. Keeping livestock out of the high country became one of Muir's first causes.

Which words complete John Muir's famous 1873 line to his sister, 'The mountains are calling and I...'?

The line ends with must go, in a letter to his sister Sarah dated 3 September 1873. It stayed private until a collection of Muir's letters appeared in 1924, ten years after his death.

The John Muir Way, a coast-to-coast walking route opened in 2014, crosses which country where Muir was born?

Scotland was Muir's home until he was 11, and the 134-mile route ends at his birthplace in the seaside town of Dunbar. It starts on the west coast at Helensburgh.

John Muir appears on California's 2005 state quarter alongside Yosemite's Half Dome and which endangered bird?

A condor shares the coin with Muir and the granite dome he loved. He was also the first person California honored with a commemorative day of his own.

Before John Muir's glacier theory won out, California's state geologist insisted Yosemite Valley was created by what?

An earthquake that dropped the valley floor in one convulsion was the official view, and its author dismissed Muir as an amateur. When a real tremor shook Yosemite in 1872, Muir ran out of his cabin to welcome it.

Which valley in Yosemite National Park did John Muir fight in vain to save from being dammed and flooded?

Hetch Hetchy was lost when Congress approved the dam in 1913, about a year before Muir died. The fight is often described as the first major battle of the environmental movement.

The dam John Muir fought until 1913 was built to send mountain water to which growing city?

San Francisco began receiving the water in 1934, sent 167 miles across the state by aqueduct. That was twenty years after Muir's death.

When John Muir's family emigrated to America in 1849, they started a farm in which Midwestern state?

Wisconsin was still largely wild country around the Muirs' Fountain Lake Farm, where the 11-year-old first explored American lakes and meadows. The site is now a National Historic Landmark.

By age 11, John Muir's strict father had made him learn by heart most of which book?

The Bible went in under threat of a whipping: Muir said he could recite the whole New Testament and most of the Old by heart and by sore flesh.

John Muir made seven trips between 1879 and 1899 to study the glaciers of which future US state?

Alaska drew Muir back again and again to watch living ice at work, the force he believed had carved Yosemite. One of its great glaciers now carries his name.

John Muir's much-loved story Stickeen recounts a day on a glacier with what kind of companion?

A dog named Stickeen shared the 1880 outing, and the tale became a classic of its kind. Muir said it was the hardest thing he ever tried to write.

The John Muir Trail runs more than 200 miles from Yosemite Valley to the summit of which peak?

Mount Whitney, the highest point in the contiguous United States, marks the southern end. Work on the trail began in 1915, the year after Muir died, and finished in 1938.

Muir Woods National Monument, named for John Muir in 1908, protects old-growth groves of which tree?

Coast redwood groves in the canyon were bought by William Kent to stop logging, then given to the nation. He insisted that the new monument carry Muir's name.

Which celebrated American essayist met John Muir in Yosemite in 1871 and offered him a teaching post at Harvard?

Ralph Waldo Emerson spent a day with the young unknown and wanted him at Harvard. Muir refused to trade the mountains for a professorship, though he kept reading the older man's essays by firelight.

The 1890 law creating Yosemite National Park, which John Muir championed, was modeled on which earlier park?

Yellowstone set the pattern, and Congress drew the boundaries almost as Muir had proposed in two magazine articles that year. Yosemite Valley itself stayed under state control until 1906.

The Sierra Club, co-founded by John Muir in 1892, was first proposed as which kind of club?

Alpine was the word a Berkeley professor used when he pitched Muir a local club for mountain lovers. Muir was elected its leader a week after the first meeting and kept the post for 22 years.

Which first chief of the US Forest Service broke with John Muir in 1897 over commercial use of forest reserves?

Gifford Pinchot wanted forests managed for lasting use, while Muir wanted them left alone. Their quarrel split the movement into conservationists and preservationists.

In 1867 John Muir set out on foot from Kentucky and walked about a thousand miles to which state?

Florida was the end of the road, at Cedar Key on the Gulf coast, where malaria nearly killed him. Muir had no fixed route beyond taking the wildest, leafiest, least trodden way he could find.

A fellow student's lesson beneath a black locust tree sent John Muir flying to the woods to study which science?

Botany hooked Muir the moment he learned that the towering locust and the humble garden pea are close relatives. He left university without a degree, yet knew enough to guide his later wanderings.

John Muir died of pneumonia on Christmas Eve 1914 in which city, far from the Sierra he loved?

Los Angeles was where Muir's last trip ended: he had gone to the desert town of Daggett to visit family. He was 76 and had kept traveling almost to the end.

Camp Muir, a climbers' refuge honoring John Muir's 1888 ascent, sits high on which Washington volcano?

Mount Rainier's most-used high camp stands above 10,000 feet. Muir climbed the peak after years of ranch work had worn down his health, and the trip helped send him back to the wild.

Which milestone did John Muir reach only in 1903, more than fifty years after arriving in America?

US citizenship came when Muir was 65. By then he had already co-founded the Sierra Club and helped create Yosemite National Park.

John Muir spent the last years of the US Civil War collecting plants and working at a sawmill in which country?

Canada took Muir in from 1864, after his brother had gone north to avoid the draft. He worked at a rake factory in Ontario until fire destroyed it in 1866.

John Muir wrote that on leaving college without a degree he was simply transferring to the University of what?

The Wilderness is the university Muir claimed in the closing line of his autobiography. He wrote that he said goodbye to his alma mater in tears.

Caught overnight by a blizzard near the summit of Mount Shasta, John Muir survived by doing what?

Lying in hot springs near the top kept Muir alive until morning, thanks to the volcano's sulfur vents. He later turned the ordeal into a dramatic magazine article.

John Muir argued that California's Sierra Nevada, named in Spanish for its snow, should instead be called what?

The Range of Light was Muir's name for it after he saw the peaks glowing from across the Central Valley. Ten years of wandering among them only convinced him the title fit.

John Muir wrote some of his articles with a quill made from a feather of which bird, found on a Yosemite peak?

A golden eagle feather picked up on Mount Hoffmann became Muir's pen. Writing never came easily to him, and he called making books a long, tiresome, endless job.

Which songbird of rushing western rivers, once called the water ouzel, was John Muir's favorite bird?

American dipper is today's name for the bird Muir gave a whole chapter of The Mountains of California. He likened it to a hummingbird of blooming waters.

Inside the notebook he carried on his thousand-mile walk in 1867, John Muir gave his address as what?

Earth-planet, Universe followed his name on the inside cover, a sign of how widely the 29-year-old already thought. The journal was published as a book only after his death.

The John Muir Trail shares about 160 miles of its route with which far longer hiking trail?

Pacific Crest hikers follow Muir's namesake path through the highest, wildest stretch of the range. The longer trail runs about 2,650 miles in all.

Which deep Sierra valley did John Muir praise in an 1891 magazine article as a rival of the Yosemite?

Kings Canyon looked so much like Yosemite Valley that Muir took it as proof ice had carved them both. A national park bearing its name followed in 1940.

John Muir gave which nickname to the study in his Martinez mansion where he wrote at his desk?

The scribble den still holds Muir's original desk. The house, built by his father-in-law, is now a national historic site that offers tours.

John Muir spent ten years managing his father-in-law's 2,600-acre ranch at Martinez, California, growing what?

Fruit from the orchards later left on a railway that crossed the ranch itself. When Muir grew restless, his wife would shoo him back up to the mountains.

After malaria ended his long walk south, John Muir sailed in 1868 to which island before heading for California?

Cuba gave the recovering Muir hours of studying shells and flowers around Havana. He then booked a passage west, where he would first see Yosemite.

Which railroad tycoon invited John Muir on a lavish 1899 scientific cruise and later lobbied Congress for him?

The host had a steamship refitted for the voyage and filled it with leading scientists. Muir found E. H. Harriman distasteful at first, yet ended up writing an admiring tribute after his death.

Which magazine published the two 1890 John Muir articles that pushed Congress to create Yosemite National Park?

The Century had an editor, Robert Underwood Johnson, who camped with Muir at Tuolumne Meadows in 1889 and urged him to write. Johnson then lobbied Congress for the park himself.

John Muir sailed the Arctic in 1881 aboard the cutter Corwin, which was searching for which lost exploring ship?

USS Jeannette was crushed by ice and sank north of Siberia that June, unknown to the searchers. Muir's dispatches from the voyage later became the book The Cruise of the Corwin.

Which small mountain mammal, a relative of rabbits, had a subspecies named muiri in honor of John Muir?

A pika subspecies was named for him, and so were a wren, a butterfly, a millipede, two asters and a mineral called muirite.

Which Swiss-born Harvard scientist, a champion of ice-age theory, praised John Muir's grasp of glacial action?

Louis Agassiz called Muir the first man he had found with any adequate conception of glacial action. The praise carried weight, since he was the premier geologist of the day.

Which landscape painter, born in the same year and country as John Muir, was his close friend for 38 years?

William Keith painted the California mountains Muir wrote about. When Muir scolded him for not copying nature, he is said to have replied that the next dawn would imitate his sunrise.

John Muir carried out the first excavations of an ancient pueblo ruin in 1905–06 in which Arizona park?

Petrified Forest also gave Muir fossils, which now sit in a University of California museum. He never published his findings but urged the federal government to protect the place.

Which New York newspaper printed John Muir's first article written for publication, on Yosemite's glaciers, in 1871?

The Tribune ran the piece in December 1871, a few months after Muir quit his sawmill job in the valley. His growing circle of literary and scientific friends soon made his name.

University records listed the unconventional student John Muir under which odd class status?

Irregular gent was the label because Muir took only the courses that interested him. After two years he was still ranked no higher than a first-year student.

John Muir first won public notice in 1860 by exhibiting what at a state agricultural fair?

Handmade clocks and a thermometer earned Muir a diploma and a cash prize. Jeanne Carr, asked to assess the exhibits, spotted his talent and became a lifelong mentor.

John Muir reportedly set off into Yosemite's backcountry with a tin cup, bread, a book and a handful of what?

Tea and a loaf were his whole larder on solo trips. He spent the evenings beside a campfire in his overcoat, reading essays under the stars.