Sublime

John Muir is remembered primarily as a no-nonsense conservationist and the founding president of the Sierra Club, but he was also a bold adventurer, a fearless scrambler of peaks, glaciers, and waterfalls whose best-known essay includes a riveting account of nearly falling to his death, in 1872, while ascending California’s Mt. Ritter.

I was expecting a wealth of amateur historians, with an encyclopedic knowledge of the fur trade and fresh insights to borrow, but the first twenty people I talked to had never heard of Joe Walker. Reading history books, it turned out, was not a popular

His writings and lectures on the Ice Age lent a whole new aura to the New England landscape just at the time when the New England landscape was being “discovered” by poets and painters, and White Mountain hotels had become the rage.

(A year later Ball would die of a similar ailment on the slopes of Dhaulagiri.)

alpenglow.