The Project Gutenberg EBook of Steep Trails, by John Muir

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Title: Steep Trails

Author: John Muir

Posting Date: July 11, 2008 [EBook #326]
Release Date: September, 1995

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STEEP TRAILS ***

Produced by Judy Gibson

STEEP TRAILS

California-Utah-Nevada-Washington-Oregon-The Grand Canyon

by John Muir

EDITOR'S NOTE

The papers brought together in this volume have, in a general way, been
arranged in chronological sequence. They span a period of twenty-nine
years of Muir's life, during which they appeared as letters and
articles, for the most part in publications of limited and local
circulation. The Utah and Nevada sketches, and the two San Gabriel
papers, were contributed, in the form of letters, to the San Francisco
Evening Bulletin toward the end of the seventies. Written in the field,
they preserve the freshness of the author's first impressions of those
regions. Much of the material in the chapters on Mount Shasta first took
similar shape in 1874. Subsequently it was rewritten and much expanded
for inclusion in Picturesque California, and the Region West of the
Rocky Mountains, which Muir began to edit in 1888. In the same work
appeared the description of Washington and Oregon. The charming little
essay "Wild Wool" was written for the Overland Monthly in 1875. "A
Geologist's Winter Walk" is an extract from a letter to a friend, who,
appreciating its fine literary quality, took the responsibility of
sending it to the Overland Monthly without the author's knowledge. The
concluding chapter on "The Grand Canyon of the Colorado" was published
in the Century Magazine in 1902, and exhibits Muir's powers of
description at their maturity.

Some of these papers were revised by the author during the later years
of his life, and these revisions are a part of the form in which they
now appear. The chapters on Mount Shasta, Oregon, and Washington will
be found to contain occasional sentences and a few paragraphs that were
included, more or less verbatim, in The Mountains of California and Our
National Parks. Being an important part of their present conte