Steep Trails

Steep Trails is a posthumously published collection of essays by John Muir (1838–1914), the American naturalist and pioneer of the environmental movement. Edited and compiled by William Frederic Badè, it was first published in 1918 by Houghton Mifflin Company of Boston and New York. The book gathers twenty-four pieces drawn from articles Muir published in magazines, letters to the San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, and a long essay he wrote early on for Picturesque California. Written roughly between 1873 and 1902, they span nearly thirty years of his wanderings through the American West. The pieces unfold in geographical order: beginning in California's Sierra Nevada and Mount Shasta, with snow peaks, glacial traces, and mountain forests; then moving into Utah, with the Mormon community of Salt Lake City, bathing in the Salt Lake, and a great Utah storm; next Nevada, with its farms, timber belts, glacial landforms, and abandoned mining towns; then north to Washington's Puget Sound and Mount Rainier; then Oregon's climate, forests, inhabitants, and rivers; and finally the Grand Canyon of the Colorado in Arizona. With a naturalist's eye and a poet's pen, Muir weaves geology, plants, climate, and human activity into a single fabric: a blizzard, a lone pine, an empty town, a river—each draws from him deep reflection on the beauty of nature and the value of wilderness. The book is both a precious record of the American West in the late nineteenth century and an accessible introduction to Muir's idea that wilderness is home.