Yosemite Glaciers

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"Yosemite Glaciers"

Newspaper article

Date: December 5, 1871

Source: Muir, John. "Yosemite Glaciers." New York Tribune. December 5, 1871.

About the Author: Naturalist John Muir (1838–1914) was a Scottish-born wilderness explorer, best known for his adventures in the glaciers of Alaska and California's Sierra Nevada. Muir feared that the United States as he had witnessed it would gradually become overdeveloped, and he wrote extensively about the importance of protecting the natural landscape and wildlife of the country. His work was instrumental in the creation of the national parks, including Yellowstone, Yosemite, Mount Rainier, and Grand Canyon National Park, and his writing inspired many of the conservation programs enacted by President Theodore Roosevelt, including the first National Monuments by Presidential Proclamation. Muir also co-founded the Sierra Club in 1892, providing a formal organization for environmental activists to continue working for the preservation of the nation's mountain ranges.

INTRODUCTION

In the following excerpt from Muir's first published work, the author compares various aspects of the Yosemite Valley to the pages of a book. By examining those aspects, he is able to read—that is, to reconstruct—the shape and activity of the glacier itself.

Unlike the geologists of his time, who argued that the Yosemite Valley was formed by the activity of an earthquake, Muir asserted (and convincingly demonstrated) that it was carved out by the work of glaciers, mighty rivers of ice that rushed over the surface of the earth. The glacier shaped it and left sediments that became its soil, beds for its rivers, and ranges of mountains. More, however, than a first-rate geologist, in his descriptions of the valley and the glacier that formed it, Muir showed his love for nature and the processes of nature that excited his admiration and his reverence.

PRIMARY SOURCE

Two years ago, when picking flowers in the mountains back of Yosemite Valley, I found a book. It was blotted and storm-beaten; all of its outer pages were mealy and crumbly, the paper seemed to dissolve like the snow beneath which it had been buried; but many of the inner pages were well preserved, and though all were more or less stained and torn, whole chapters were easily readable. In this condition is the great open book of Yosemite glaciers today; its granite pages have been torn and blurred by the same storms that wasted the castaway book. The grand central chapters of the Hoffman, and Tenaya, and Nevada glaciers are stained and corroded by the frosts and rains, yet, nevertheless, they contain scarce one unreadable page; but the outer chapters of the Pohono, and the Illilouette, and the Yosemite Creek, and Ribbon, and Cascade glaciers, are all dimmed and eaten away on the bottom, though the tops of their pages have not been so long exposed, and still proclaim in splendid characters the glorious actions of their departed ice. The glacier which filled the basin of the Yosemite Creek was the fourth ice-stream that flowed to Yosemite Valley. It was about fifteen miles in length by five in breadth at the middle of the main stream, and in many places was not less than 1,000 feet in depth. It united with the central glaciers in the valley by a mouth reaching from the east side of El Capitan to Yosemite Point, east of the falls. Its western rim was rayed with short tributaries, and on the north its divide from the Tuolumne glacier was deeply grooved; but few if any of its ridges were here high enough to separate the descending ice into distinct tributaries. The main central trunk flowed nearly south, and, at a distance of about 10 miles, separated into three nearly equal branches, which were turned abruptly to the east.

Those branch basins are laid among the highest spurs of the Hoffman range and abound in small, bright lakes, set in the solid granite without the usual terminal moraine dam. The structure of those dividing spurs is exactly similar, all three appearing as if ruins of one mountain, or rather as perfect units hewn from one mountain rock during long ages of glacial activity. As their north sides are precipitous, and as they extend east and west, they were enabled to shelter and keep alive their hiding glaciers long after the death of the main trunk. Their basins are still dazzling bright, and their lakes have as yet accumulated but narrow rings of border meadow, because their feeding streams have had but little time to carry the sand of which they are made. The east bank of the main stream, all the way from the three forks to the mouth, is a continuous, regular wall, which also forms the west bank of the Indian Cañon glacier-basin. The tributaries of the west side of the main basin touched the east tributaries of the cascade, and the great Tuolumne glacier from Mount Dana, the mightiest ice-river of this whole region, flowed past on the north. The declivity of the tributaries was great, especially those which flowed from the spurs of the Hoffman on the Tuolumne divide, but the main stream was rather level, and in approaching Yosemite was compelled to make a considerable ascent back of Eagle Cliff. To the concentrated currents of the central glaciers, and to the levelness and width of mouth of this one, we in a great measure owe the present height of the Yosemite Falls. Yosemite Creek lives the most tranquil life of all the large streams that leap into the valley, the others occupying the cañons of narrower and, consequently, of deeper glaciers, while yet far from the valley, abound in loud falls and snowy cascades, but Yosemite Creek flows straight on through smooth meadows and hollows, with only two or three gentle cascades, and now and then a row of soothing, rumbling rapids, biding its time, and hoarding up the best music and poetry of its life for the one anthem at Yosemite, as planned by the ice.

When a bird's-eye view of Yosemite Basin is obtained from any of its upper domes, it is seen to possess a great number of dense patches of black forest, planted in abrupt contact with bare gray rocks. Those forest plots mark the number and the size of all the entire and fragmentary moraines of the basin, as the latter eroding agents have not yet had sufficient time to form a soil fit for the vigorous life of large trees.

Wherever a deep-wombed tributary laid against a narrow ridge, and was also shielded from the sun by compassing rock-shadows, there we invariably find more small terminal moraines, because when such tributaries were melted off from the trunk they retired to those upper strongholds of shade, and lived and worked in full independence, and the moraines which they built are left entire because the water-collecting basins behind are too small to make streams large enough to wash them away; but in the basins of exposed tributaries there are no terminal moraines, because their glaciers died with the trunk. Medial and lateral moraines are common upon all the outside slopes, some of them nearly perfect in form, but down in the main basin there is not left one unaltered moraine of any kind, immense floods having washed down and leveled them into harder meadows for the present stream, and into sandy flower beds and fields for forests.

Such was Yosemite glacier, and such is its basin, the magnificent work of its hands. There is sublimity in the life of a glacier. Water rivers work openly, and so the rains and the gentle dews, and the great sea also grasping all the world: and even the universal ocean of breath, though invisible, yet speaks aloud in a thousand voices, and proclaims its modes of working and its power: but glaciers work apart from men, exerting their tremendous energies in silence and darkness, outspread, spirit-like, brooding above predestined rocks unknown to light, unborn, working on unwearied through unmeasured times, unhalting as the stars, until at length, their creations complete, their mountains brought forth, homes made for the meadows and the lakes, and fields for waiting forests, earnest, calm as when they came as crystals from the sky, they depart.

The great valley itself, together with all its domes and walls, was brought forth and fashioned by a grand combination of glaciers, acting in certain directions against granite of peculiar physical structure. All of the rocks and mountains and lakes and meadows of the whole upper Merced basin received their specific forms and carvings almost entirely from this same agency of ice. I have been drifting about among the rocks of this region for several years, anxious to spell out some of the mountain truths which are written here; and since the number, and magnitude, and significance of these ice-rivers began to appear, I have become anxious for more exact knowledge regarding them; with this object, supplying myself with blankets and bread, I climbed out of the Yosemite by Indian Cañon, and am now searching the upper rocks and moraines for readable glacier manuscript.

SIGNIFICANCE

Muir can be seen, by his legacy, as the vital spur and center of a movement which is responsible for preserving countless acres of North American wilder-ness through practical political action and by active dissemination of a gospel of nature.

Because of Muir's work, America's system of National Parks was created and the strand of belief in the sanctity of nature that runs through American thought was strengthened. In his nature writings he endowed natural phenomena with often awesome spiritual dimensions. Primarily because of his writings and his activism, Yosemite, Sequoia, Mount Rainier, Petrified Forest, and Grand Canyon National Parks were created. Not only did he venture into nature alone, but he encouraged others to encounter nature face to face. Because of Muir's work and friendship, President Theodore Roosevelt pressed the United States Congress for the Antiquities Act and the National Monuments Act in 1906, which gave the president of the United States the power to proclaim a region a national monument. Through this process, Congress created Yosemite National Park in 1906. Using the same Act in 2000, and citing John Muir, President Bill Clinton established the Giant Sequoia National Monument in the California Sequoia National Park.

Muir was not always successful in his campaigns to defend nature against modification and exploitation. In 1913, the U.S. Congress permitted the state of California, despite Muir's fierce opposition, to dam the Tuolumne River in Yosemite and flood the Hetch Hetchy Valley, a nearly exact, although smaller, replica of the Yosemite Valley to supply drinking water to San Francisco. Although the project was completed in 1923, the Sierra Club is still fighting to remove the dam and restore the valley. The Sierra Club, following in Muir's footsteps, continues to oppose threats to the natural environment. In 2005, the George W. Bush administration decided to permit logging inside the area President Clinton had designated the Giant Sequoia Monument, and the Sierra Club moved to oppose the decision through a court challenge.

In his books, Muir conveyed his desire to instill in others a similar devotion; he succeeded so well that even in the twenty-first century he remains highly honored. Forests have been named after him, and so have three kinds of plants. Two U.S. stamps have been issued in his honor. The California legislature has declared April 21 John Muir Day, and the California state quarter issued in 2005 bears his likeness.

Muir's work and legacy are not only honored in the United States. The John Muir Trust of Scotland also works to celebrate, explore, and protect the natural landscape and, in 1997, established the John Muir Award to encourage the continuation of his work.