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Bonnie Gisel

Yosemite National Park, California
Curator
LeConte Memorial Lodge

For the last five years, environmental historian, educator, and John Muir scholar Bonnie Gisel has lived and worked five months a year in a locale that would likely have made the Sierra Club's founder green with envy: Yosemite Valley.

From May through September, Gisel is curator of the LeConte Memorial Lodge, built by the Sierra Club in 1903-04 in memoriam to Dr. Joseph LeConte, a close friend of Muir's and one of the Club's charter members. LeConte died in Yosemite Valley in 1901 at age 76, on the eve of a Sierra Club outing from the valley to Toulumne Meadows. A highly respected Professor of Geology at the University of California, LeConte was one of the first scientists to support Muir's theory of the glaciation of Yosemite Valley.

To say that Gisel finds inspiration in the life and work of these two men would be a little like saying that Popeye finds inspiration in spinach. In addition to her duties at the LeConte Lodge, she is archivist at the John Muir National Historic Site in Martinez, California, and a research fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. Among her previous positions and appointments, too numerous to list here, she served as director of the John Muir Center at the University of the Pacific, where she coordinated the John Muir: Family and Friends Conference in 2001.

Gisel has just finished a new book, John Muir as Botanist, and she previously authored Kindred and Related Spirits, a compilation of the correspondence between Muir and his good friend and mentor, Jeanne C. Carr, whose artistic abilities inspired Gisel to create the Wilderness Quilt Project.

At the LeConte Lodge, Gisel encourages visitors to jot down on a slip of paper their thoughts about nature, wilderness, and wildlife for her Words for Wilderness project. (You can now submit contributions online as well.) She also urges people to keep a nature journal--something Muir did on his wilderness rambles--while they are in Yosemite or elsewhere in the wild.

In 2004 Gisel planned the schedule of events for the lodge's centennial celebration and wrote the opening and closing remarks for the ceremony as well as essays on LeConte, the lodge, and its centennial rededication. Last year she launched the Green Shoes Project, which encourages visitors to care for nature and be responsible stewards of wilderness. "I want to instill in others a wonder of the world and an appreciation of nature so it becomes part of our daily breathing," she says.

Gisel was honored with the 2006 John Muir Conservation Award by the John Muir Association in Martinez, recognizing her re-energizing of the LeConte Lodge, her Muir scholarship, and her dedication to environmental education. And this year she appeared on the "California Gold" PBS television series, in a segment about the Sierra Club's physical and spiritual home in Yosemite National Park. View that clip here.

Published: October 31, 2007