The Mountains of CaliforniaCentury Company, 1894 - 381 páginas Famed naturalist John Muir (1838-1914) came to Wisconsin as a boy and studied at the University of Wisconsin. He first came to California in 1868 and devoted six years to the study of the Yosemite Valley. After work in Nevada, Utah, and Colorado, he returned to California in 1880 and made the state his home. One of the heroes of America's conservation movement, Muir deserves much of the credit for making the Yosemite Valley a protected national park and for alerting Americans to the need to protect this and other natural wonders. The mountains of California (1894) is his book length tribute to the beauties of the Sierras. He recounts not only his own journeys by foot through the mountains, glaciers, forests, and valleys, but also the geological and natural history of the region, ranging from the history of glaciers, the patterns of tree growth, and the daily life of animals and insects. While Yosemite naturally receives great attention, Muir also expounds on less well known beauty spots. |
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Palavras e frases frequentes
alpine argali avalanches basin beautiful bees belt beneath birds bloom branches California cañon cascades chaparral coast mountains color cones conifer curves dark deer diameter Douglas Douglas squirrel Dwarf Pine elevation fall feet high floods flowers foot foot-hills forest glacial glacier glorious granite grasses gray ground groves growing head height High Sierra inches Indians King's River lake lakelets landscape larvæ leaves light meadows melting Merced miles Mono Moraine Lake moraines moun Mount Ritter Mount Shasta mountain Mountain Pine nearly névé never noble Ouzel panicles pass peaks plain portion purple rain range region ridges rise rocks rocky seeds seemed seen Sequoia side Silver Fir sing slender slopes snow soil species specimens spray Spruce squirrels storm streams Sugar Pine summer summit sunshine surface tains trees tributaries trunk Tuolumne wall warm wild sheep wind winter woods yellow Yosemite Valley
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Página 154 - I laid my gun at my feet on the ground and waved my hand for him to come to me, which he did with great caution. I made him place his bow and quiver beside my gun, and then struck a light and gave him to smoke and a few beads.
Página 250 - I could distinctly hear the varying tones of individual trees, — Spruce, and Fir, and Pine, and leafless Oak, —and even the infinitely gentle rustle of the withered grasses at my feet. Each was expressing itself in its own way, — singing its own song, and making its own peculiar gestures, — manifesting a richness of variety to be found in no other forest I have yet seen. The coniferous woods of Canada, and the Carolinas, and Florida, are made up of trees that resemble one another about as...
Página 189 - Now these historic ditches and root bowls occur in all the present sequoia groves and forests, but not the faintest vestige of one presents itself outside of them. We therefore conclude that the area covered by sequoia has not been diminished during the last eight or ten thousand years, and probably not at all in post-glacial times.
Página 192 - ... on the contrary, the grove is the cause of the water being there. Drain off the water and the trees will remain, but cut off the trees, and the streams will vanish.
Página 299 - Territories; for it never fails to engage the attention of naturalists in a very particular manner. Such, then, is our little cinclus, beloved of every one who is so fortunate as to know him. Tracing on strong wing every curve of the most precipitous torrents from one extremity of the Sierra to the other; not fearing to follow them through their darkest gorges and coldest snowtunnels; acquainted with every waterfall, echoing their divine music ; and throughout the whole of their beautiful lives interpreting...
Página 64 - After gaining a point about halfway to the top, I was suddenly brought to a dead stop, with arms outspread, clinging close to the face of the rock, unable to move hand or foot either up or down. My doom appeared fixed. I must fall. There would be a moment of bewilderment, and then a lifeless rumble down the one general precipice to the glacier below.
Página 65 - I seemed suddenly to become possessed of a new sense. The other self, bygone experiences, Instinct, or Guardian Angel, — call it what you will, — came forward and assumed control. Then my trembling muscles became firm again, every rift and flaw in the rock was seen as through a microscope, and my limbs moved with a positiveness and precision with which I seemed to have nothing at all to do. Had I been borne aloft upon wings, my deliverance could not have been more complete.
Página 256 - We all travel the milky way together, trees and men; but it never occurred to me until this storm-day, while swinging in the wind, that trees are travelers, in the ordinary sense.
Página 249 - I heard trees falling for hours at the rate of one every two or three minutes: some uprooted, partly on account of the loose, watersoaked condition of the ground; others broken straight across, where some weakness caused by fire had determined the spot. The gestures of the various trees made a delightful study. Young Sugar Pines, light and feathery as squirrel-tails, were bowing almost to the ground; while the grand old patriarchs, whose massive boles had been tried in a hundred storms, waved solemnly...
Página 339 - Mints, gilias, nemophilas, castilleias, and innumerable composite were so crowded together that, had ninety-nine per cent. of them been taken away, the plain would still have seemed to any but Californians extravagantly flowery. The radiant, honeyful corollas, touching and overlapping, and rising above one another, glowed in the living light like a sunset sky — one sheet...