“gentians don't mind the first frost …”

Late summer on upper Deep Creek; Medicine Bow Mountains, Wyoming.

The wet meadow along Deep Creek was mostly dry. I walked through tall grasses and sedges topped with brown seed heads, their leaves turning yellow, and low shrubby willows with lusterless-green upturned leaves. But my feet stayed dry. Tiny ponds and mud holes were the only surface moisture. This is typical for September in the higher mountains.

Short field assistant deals with tall sedges and grasses.

What caught me by surprise were all the rich blue patches of life scattered about—a beautiful contrast!

But I shouldn't have been surprised. Pleated Gentians (Gentiana affinis) are always late bloomers. Yet I was caught off guard. It’s not that they were unexpected; they just aren’t part of the seasonal picture until I’m reminded.

Pleated Gentian, Gentiana affinis. Both flowers and buds were common. 

Gentiana is a large cosmopolitan genus, with on the order of 400 species. Most are native to the Northern Hemisphere. Many grow in montane to alpine habitats, where mountaineers love them for their showy displays on harsh sites, and their proclivity for blooming even as summer winds down.

Arctic or Whitish Gentian, Gentiana algida, “common to alpine settings in the Rocky Mountains.”

Matt Lavin photo.

The Pleated Gentian is widespread in western North America, in moist habitats ranging from montane to alpine. Other common names include Trapper’s Gentian and Marsh Gentian (and there are probably more).

It’s odd that this gentian is designated "Pleated".  True, it does have folds or pleats between the petal lobes. But then so do all true gentians—members of the genus Gentiana (for example the Alpine Gentian above). The botanical term for this flower form is “plicate” meaning folded, like the pleats of a curtain.

Larger blue lobes are petal tips; smaller ones in-between are pleats.

Ragged tips of pleats show nicely in photo of Gentiana affinis by Rolf Englestrand [cropped].

When I first tried to identify this gentian, the flowers led me astray. I assumed that the dull green covering of the buds, which “persists” when the flower opens, was sepals—the outermost whorl of flower parts, usually green. But no … that green tissue is part of the petals. The sepals are indeed green, but they’re tiny and hidden under leaf-like bracts.

Pleated Gentian flower bud; just the green petal tissue is visible (see flower parts below).

Gentians were a favorite of the great mountaineer, naturalist and conservationist, John Muir. He often mentioned them in descriptions of mountain meadows in the Sierra Nevada of California. Muir especially appreciated their habit of blooming so late in the season, providing much-welcomed color.

“The gentians don't mind the first frost though their petals seem so delicate; they close every night as if going to sleep, and awake fresh as ever in the morning sun-glory.” from My First Summer in the Sierra (Chapter 10)

Re-reading John Muir

 John Muir in his mid-30s, ca 1875. Source.

In 1969, the exciting ideas transforming the public consciousness finally reached my small conservative working-class town: Question authority! Reject the status quo! Down with the Establishment! I rejoiced, and gratefully began marching to the beats of different drummers. The most influential was John Muir. I still hear his drum, and today being Muir’s birthday, I’m honoring him with a post.

John Muir, the great naturalist and one of the earliest and most effective proponents of wild area protection, was born in 1838 in Scotland. His family immigrated to the US in 1849, finally settling near Portage, Wisconsin. Muir led a life of hard labor on the family farm, but managed to find time to ramble through the still-wild woods and prairies nearby, where he found himself “utterly happy.”

He enrolled in the University of Wisconsin, made good grades, but left after three years to take to the road. Odd jobs supported his adventures—until an accident in a carriage shop left him blind. Fortunately it was temporary. And with that glimpse of what fate could deliver, Muir declared he would devote his life to his passion—“the inventions of God” in the wild natural world.

After walking a thousand miles to the Gulf of Mexico, Muir sailed to Cuba, crossed Panama, and then sailed north to San Francisco, arriving in March of 1868. He took the ferry to Oakland, and asked for directions “to any place that is wild.” He walked across the flower-filled San Joaquín Valley to the Sierra Nevada, and took up residence in Yosemite Valley, occasionally working as sheepherder.

Sublime glacial landscape of the Sierra Nevada.  Photo by RC Koeppel.

Muir rambled through the high country of the great mountain range admiring, studying, sketching, and writing of landscapes, streams, glaciers, plants, animals and rocks. In 1874, a series of articles about the Sierra launched his writing career. In his long life he would produce 300 articles and ten major books, and I’m quite sure that if Muir were alive today, he would blog.

I've forgotten which of Muir’s books I read first. But I clearly remember how his contagious excitement for wild nature pulled me back into a world I lived in as a kid, when I wandered up and down the creek examining plants, rocks, frogs, newts and water-skippers. Surely if I could stay in that world, my life would be free-spirited and satisfying.

Lopez Creek, in the central California Coast Ranges.

Last year I ran into Muir in a used bookstore, finding his essay on the water-ouzel, his favorite bird, in an anthology of the best natural history writing—The Book of Naturalists,1944, William Beebe editor. I bought the book, went home, turned to Muir’s essay, and was stopped by Beebe’s puzzling introduction. Muir had a “keen, sober, but uncreative interest, almost passion, for wild things and wild scenes” he claimed.

“He became a hesperian Thoreau, with less philosophy but infinitely more physical guts than the Cambridge dreamer [Henry David Thoreau], and he could guide his thoughts more consistently into an essay on a given subject.  Yet with the years Muir’s writings have seemed to me to have grown thinner, while Thoreau’s often inconsequential thoughts have held to their initial force.” [italics mine]

What did Beebe mean?! Did Muir’s writings grow thinner as time passed, or as Beebe grew older? Would I find my hero and mentor thinner with my accumulated years? Others certainly had diminished—for example, Thoreau!

But just a few paragraphs in, Muir was as engaging as he had been years ago; in fact, his writing seems to have grown stronger. To each his own I guess. Perhaps editor Beebe didn't understand a man who could thrive in wild places—living simply, happily observing God’s work. Maybe Muir’s enthusiastic colorful imagery-filled writing was unappealing. Maybe Beebe was more drawn to Thoreau’s focused contemplative darker style and profound conclusions. Not me. Muir's whimsical but aptly-descriptive language is heartening, reminding me there is much to be excited about.

• • • 

“The waterfalls of the Sierra are frequented by only one bird,—the Ouzel or Water Thrush (Cinclus Mexicanus, Sw.). He is a singularly joyous and lovable little fellow, about the size of a robin, clad in a plain waterproof suit of bluish gray, with a tinge of chocolate on the head and shoulders. In form he is about as smoothly plump and compact as a pebble that has been whirled in a pot-hole, the flowing contour of his body being interrupted only by his strong feet and bill, the crisp wing-tips, and the up-slanted wren-like tail.” [all quotes that follow are Muir’s]

Officially this is now the American Dipper, but he remains a water-ouzel to me. Photo by Ron Knight.

“The Ouzel seldom swims more than a few yards on the surface, for, not being web-footed, he makes rather slow progress, but by means of his strong, crisp wings he swims, or rather flies, with celerity under the surface, often to considerable distances. But it is in withstanding the force of heavy rapids that his strength of wing in this respect is most strikingly manifested.”

“WATER OUZEL DIVING AND FEEDING”  Ouzels tolerate temperatures well below freezing—enabled by low metabolic rate, oxygen-rich blood, and thick feathers (source for all sketches).

“He seems to be especially fond of the larvæ of mosquitos, found in abundance attached to the bottom of smooth rock channels where the current is shallow. When feeding in such places he wades up-stream, and often while his head is under water the swift current is deflected upward along the glossy curves of his neck and shoulders, in the form of a clear, crystalline shell, which fairly incloses him like a bell-glass, the shell being broken and re-formed as he lifts and dips his head …”

 “ONE OF THE LATE-SUMMER FEEDING-GROUNDS OF THE OUZEL”

“The Ouzel's nest is one of the most extraordinary pieces of bird architecture I ever saw, odd and novel in design, perfectly fresh and beautiful, and in every way worthy of the genius of the little builder. It is about a foot in diameter, round and bossy in outline, with a neatly arched opening near the bottom … It is built almost exclusively of green and yellow mosses, chiefly the beautiful fronded hypnum that covers the rocks and old drift-logs in the vicinity of waterfalls. … The site chosen for this curious mansion is usually some little rock-shelf within reach of the lighter particles of the spray of a waterfall, so that its walls are kept green and growing, at least during the time of high water.” 

Ouzel family. Photo by Larry Jordan (labeled for non-commercial reuse).

“… the Ouzel sings on through all the seasons and every kind of storm. Indeed no storm can be more violent than those of the waterfalls in the midst of which he delights to dwell. … The more striking strains are perfect arabesques of melody, composed of a few full, round, mellow notes, embroidered with delicate trills which fade and melt in long slender cadences. In a general way his music is that of the streams refined and spiritualized.”

“THE OUZEL AT HOME”  Listen to an ouzel sing, accompanied by a stream.

My first encounter with the ouzel was in John Muir's beloved Sierra Nevada, on one of my early hikes. Trip after trip I channelled Muir, finding the same joy he found in his Range of Light. I kept food simple, pack light, gear cheap. I took notes, and learned the names of trees. With like-minded friends I covered miles of trail, climbed peaks, and slept among “grass and gentians of glacier meadows” or anywhere “one might hope to see God.” Whenever I sauntered*** along a cold swift cascading stream, I kept an eye out for the ouzel, “flitting about in the spray, diving in foaming eddies, whirling like a leaf among beaten foam-bells; ever vigorous and enthusiastic, yet self-contained, and neither seeking nor shunning your company.”

Eventually I left California, but not the ouzel. I’ve met him in the mountains of Wyoming, Montana and Colorado, and most memorably below a waterfall in the South Dakota Black Hills—bobbing, diving, flitting, and singing “perfect arabesques of melody.” Wherever I see the “singularly joyous” ouzel, I see John Muir. I think he would be pleased.

“Among all the mountain birds, none has cheered me so much in my lonely wanderings,—none so unfailingly. For both in winter and summer he sings, sweetly, cheerily, independent alike of sunshine and of love, requiring no other inspiration than the stream on which he dwells.” 

John Muir in his early sixties, ca 1902. Library of Congress; Public Domain.

*** When asked about hiking, Muir emphatically denounced it. “People ought to saunter in the mountains—not hike! … Away back in the Middle Ages people used to go on pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and when people in the villages through which they passed asked where they were going, they would reply, ‘A la sainte terre, To the Holy Land.’ And so they became known as sainte-terre-ers or saunterers. Now these mountains are our Holy Land, and we ought to saunter through them reverently, not ‘hike’ through them.” (Albert W. Palmer, 1911, The Mountain Trail and Its Message; excerpt here)

Sources (in addition to links in post)

The Sierra Club provides extensive biographical information about its founder.

John Muir wrote about the water-ouzel in Chapter 13 of Mountains of California, provided here by the Sierra Club.

For more on the water-ouzel/American dipper: Audubon Guide to North American Birds (online); All about Birds; Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

Happy Birthday John Muir ... poetico-trampo-geologist-botanist

I took off my shoes and stockings and worked my way cautiously down ... the swift roaring flood beneath, overhead, and beside me was very nerve-trying.  I therefore concluded not to venture farther, but did nevertheless.  Tufts of artemisia were growing in clefts of the rock near by, and I filled my mouth with the bitter leaves, hoping they might help to prevent giddiness. -- John Muir

Today, April 21, is John Muir’s birthday.  For readers who might not know him, Muir is considered one of the most important naturalists and conservationists in the history of the USA, playing a major role in establishment of early National Parks and Monuments among other things.  He also was an explorer, a scientist and a writer -- a self-described "poetico-trampo-geologist-botanist and ornithologist-naturalist etc. etc. !!!!"  If alive today, John Muir would be 175 years old ... and a dedicated blogger.

Muir (right) guided, educated and persuaded President Theodore Roosevelt to protect wild lands.

Muir was born in Scotland in 1838.  Eleven years later his father moved the family to Wisconsin.  Muir was struck by how “utterly happy” he felt in “that glorious Wisconsin wilderness” where he learned “wonderful glowing lessons” from Nature rather than the dismal grammar of school.  But there was little time to enjoy it.  Childhood had ended; his days were spent in in hard labor, helping to establish a farm in the wilderness.  At night he would read books on math, poetry, and the adventures of great explorers.

Muir as a young man.

At 22, Muir left home with $15 to his name.  Though largely self-educated, he was accepted at the University of Wisconsin where he studied math, Latin, Greek and the sciences -- especially geology and botany.  He left without graduating, and lived a life of wandering supported by occasional factory work.  Then an accident in a carriage wheel factory left him blind.  He was a tortured man, suffering through dark days and nightmarish nights filled with frightful dreams.

The horror turned out to be temporary.  When his vision returned, Muir was elated.  He declared he would spend the rest of his life in the study of “the inventions of God” -- mountains, snowstorms, streams and lakes, trees and flowers, glacial cirques and polished granite ... the plants and the rocks.

When I discovered a new plant, I sat down beside it for a minute or a day to make its acquaintance and hear what it had to tell ... I asked the boulders I met, whence they came and whither they were going.

Glacier Meadow Strewn with Moraine Boulders, 10,000 Feet above the Sea (near Mt. Dana) (Muir 1894).

Muir headed first for South America, getting as far as Florida and Cuba before illness changed his plans.  He ended up instead in California, where he discovered perhaps the most sublime of Nature’s creations -- the Sierra Nevada, the Range of Light.  He lived in the mountains, exploring, studying, and achieving a nirvana of sorts.

He thinks that I am melancholy and above all that I require polishing.  I feel sure that if you were here to see how happy I am and how ardently I am seeking a knowledge of the rocks, you could not call me away but would gladly let me go with only God and his written rocks to guide me.

His ardent seeking would result in seven essays on the glaciology of the Sierra Nevada -- Studies in the Sierra (1874-75).

In 1880, Muir married and settled down ... sort of.  He successfully ran the family farm in Martinez, California, and yet managed to be gone many months each year, tramping through the Sierra Nevada, Alaska, Siberia, and whatever wild place interested him.  At 73 he set out alone for South America.  He still had not seen the Amazon, “the Earth’s greatest river” and the destination of his aborted trip fifty years earlier.  After traveling the river, he continued on to the Andes, Africa and points beyond.

And Muir wrote.  Though he sometimes spoke disparagingly of writing, it seems he couldn’t not write.  His literary legacy is considerable, fortunately.  One of Muir’s books, My First Summer in the Sierra (1911), had a very powerful effect on me early on, fueling an intense desire to wander through California’s mountains.  Reading Muir, I knew I too wanted to tramp through rocky high country, getting to know the trees, birds, rocks, finding adventure among lakes and peaks.  When I finally had the opportunity to do so, the experiences were as wonderful Muir had promised.  Forty years later I find his writing just as inspiring as I did then ... especially now that I’m something of a "poetico-trampo-geologist-botanist and ornithologist-naturalist etc. etc. !!!!" myself.

Let’s get to know John Muir a little better and share some of his experiences ... through his own words and also his sketches, often as charming as his prose.


The Botanist

This tree is remarkable for its airy, widespread, tropical appearance, which suggests a region of palms, rather than cool, resiny pine woods. No one would take it at first sight to be a conifer of any kind, it is so loose in habit and so widely branched, and its foliage is so thin and gray.

Nut Pine (now called Digger or California foothill pine) (Muir 1894).

The most influential of the grasses composing the sod is a delicate calamagrostis with fine filiform leaves, and loose, airy panicles that seem to float above the flowery lawn like a purple mist. But, write as I may, I cannot give anything like an adequate idea of the exquisite beauty of these mountain carpets as they lie smoothly outspread in the savage wilderness. What words are fine enough to picture them? to what shall we like them? The flowery levels of the prairies of the old West, the luxuriant savannahs of the South, and the finest of cultivated meadows are coarse in comparison.

Glacier Meadow, on the Headwaters of the Tuolumne, 9500 Feet above the Sea (Muir 1911).

The Geologist

Then I went above to the alphabet valleys of the summits, comparing cañon with cañon, with all their varieties of rock-structure and cleavage and the comparative size and slope of the glaciers and waters which they contained; also the grand congregations of rock-creations was present to me, and I studied their forms and sculpture ... The grandeur of these forces and their glorious results overpower me and inhabit my whole being. Waking or sleeping, I have no rest. In dreams I read blurred sheets of glacial writing, or follow lines of cleavage, or struggle with the difficulties of some extraordinary rock-form.

The Starr King group of domes (Muir 1874-1875).  Arrows show direction of flow of “ancient glacial currents”.

When I had scrambled to the top of the moraine, I saw what seemed a huge snow-bank four or five hundred yards in length by half a mile in width. Imbedded in its stained and furrowed surface were stones and dirt like that of which the moraine was built. Dirt-stained lines curved across the snow-bank from side to side, and when I observed that these curved lines coincided with the curved moraine and that the stones and dirt were most abundant near the bottom of the bank, I shouted, "A living glacier."

One of the Highest Mt. Ritter Fountains  (Muir 1911).

The Ornithologist-Naturalist

He is a singularly joyous and lovable little fellow, about the size of a robin, clad in a plain waterproof suit of bluish gray, with a tinge of chocolate on the head and shoulders. In form he is about as smoothly plump and compact as a pebble that has been whirled in a pot-hole, the flowing contour of his body being interrupted only by his strong feet and bill, the crisp wing-tips, and the up-slanted wren-like tail.

Water-ouzel diving and feeding (Muir 1894).

The Poetico-Trampo

At times, Muir’s writings suggest ecstasy ... in a man possessed by the beauty, thrill, fascinating complexity and consuming mysteries of nature.  Though extremely analytical and dedicated to scientific understanding, he also wrote from the perspective of a mystic.

I have stood by a majestic pine, witnessing its high branches waving "in sign of worship" or in converse with the spirit of the storms of autumn, till I forgot my very existence, and thought myself unworthy to be made a leaf of such a tree.

Young Sugar Pine Beginning to Bear Cones (Muir 1894).

The mountains are fountains of men as well as of rivers, of glaciers, of fertile soil. The great poets, philosophers, prophets, able men whose thoughts and deeds have moved the world, have come down from the mountains - mountain dwellers who have grown strong there with the forest trees in Nature's workshops.

Photo by Herbert W. Gleason (Muir 1911).

The Blogger

Reading John Muir, I sense an intense desire to communicate, the same kinds of feelings and motivations that we find drive us to blog.  Muir wrote in part to campaign for protection of the wild lands that he loved.  In article after article -- blog posts of the day -- he put the glories of wilderness on display.  He wanted the public to know how special these lands are.  He wanted to persuade everyone that these wonderful natural areas should be protected, rather than sacrificed for short-term gain -- to the mining, timber harvest and livestock grazing that were decimating them as he wrote.

Muir would have loved science blogging, for presenting and discussing his theories on the glacial origins of Yosemite Valley for example.  As Anne Buchanan explains “Blogging carries information, but with a much more immediate sense of the excitement, and the controversies, that scientific discoveries involve.” (see Galileo was a blogger)

I think there was something else in Muir that compelled him to write so profusely in his expressive lyrical style ... something that would have found a deep satisfaction in the blogosphere.  I believe he was so excited and taken by the natural world that he wanted to share his experiences and feelings, especially with his close friends ... but also with anyone who would listen and perhaps be persuaded to see wilderness as beautiful, fascinating, necessary, and reflective of the wondrous hand of God.

As long as I live, I'll hear waterfalls and birds and winds sing. I'll interpret the rocks, learn the language of flood, storm, and the avalanche. I'll acquaint myself with the glaciers and wild gardens, and get as near the heart of the world as I can.

Sublime glacially-molded landscape of the Yosemite high country.  Photo by RC Koeppel.

Sources

Sierra Club.  The John Muir Exhibit.  This is the place for more on Muir -- biographical information, books and other writings (many available online), photos and more.

Muir, John.  1894.  The Mountains of California.  NY:  The Century Co.

Muir, John.  1874-1875.  Studies in the Sierra, originally published in The Overland Monthly.  Sierra Club, 1950. San Francisco.

Muir, John.  1890.  Features of the Proposed Yosemite National Park.  The Century Magazine, Vol. XL. No. 5.

Muir, John.  1911.  My First Summer in the Sierra.  NY:  Houghton Mifflin Co.

Muir, John.  1915.   Letters to a friend; written to Mrs. Ezra S. Carr, 1866-1879.  NY: Houghton Mifflin Co.

Saijo, Albert.  1973.  Elders of the tribe: 2; John Muir (1938-1914).  Backpacker Volume 1 Issue 2:32, 12 pp.

Dreaming of the Range of Light

No ... I wasn’t there, unfortunately.  Photo courtesy Ronn Koeppel, who was.

I have yet to meet a mountain range as beautiful as the Sierra Nevada of California, with its vast expanses of pale granitic rock, often polished smooth by glaciers.  It's one of the largest batholiths in the world -- 60 miles wide, almost 400 miles long, and composed of an unknown number of individual plutons, probably hundreds.  These igneous bodies formed far beneath the surface, but when the Sierra Nevada was uplifted, erosion went to work to expose the gorgeous mass of rock for all to enjoy.

The east face of the Sierra Nevada stands high above the Alabama Hills, near Lone Pine, California. 

It has been a long time since I was last in the Sierra Nevada, though I’ve come close enough recently to be awestruck by its remarkable landscapes.  A trip into the Range of Light is high on my list of Dreams.

High peaks of the Sierra Nevada in early morning light; view from the crest of the White Mountains.

"it seemed not clothed with light but wholly composed of it, like the wall of some celestial city ... Then it seemed to me that the Sierra should be called, not the Nevada or Snowy Range, but the Range of Light."  -- John Muir 

Celestial scenery of the Yosemite high country.  Photo by Ronn Koeppel.