John Muir Highway - The John Muir Highway was established to honor the legendary naturalist John Muir by developing visitor sites along the County Road J132 route of Muir's 1868 walk to Yosemite from San Francisco. See also the John Muir-Yosemite Historic Highway.
John Muir Geotourism Center - Educational organization, growing out of the John Muir Highway project, promoting exploring, learning, sharing, and preserving the natural environment for mental, spiritual and physical development, as exemplified in John Muir's life.
"Homecoming: Walter Muir, grandson of the naturalist John Muir, returns to the in Daggett where he was born and spent his boyhood" Story and photos by Stuart Kellogg, Daily Press (undated, off-site link - deleted by owner) - Built by Helen Muir Funk in 1915 with money inherited from her father, the famed naturalist John Muir, the Funk-Muir house in Daggett has been a private home, a tuberculosis sanitarium, a chicken ranch, and, from 1999 to 2006, the headquarters of the Augustan Society.
Restore Hetch Hetchy: Campaign organization working to find a win-win solution allowing for the restoration of Hetch Hetchy Valley while providing water and power supplies to San Francisco.
Muir first visited Lake Tahoe in October-November of 1873, calling it the "queen of lakes" and writing his friend Jeanne Carr that he had "sauntered through the piney woods, pausing countless times to absorb the blue glimpses of the lake, all so heavenly clean, so terrestrial yet so openly spiritual." He wrote further, "The soul of Indian summer is brooding this blue water, and it enters one's being as nothing else does. Tahoe is surely not one but many. As I curve around its heads and bays and look far out on its level sky fairly tinted and fading in pensive air, I am reminded of all the mountain lakes I ever knew, as if this were a kind of water heaven to which they all had come." [Source: Letters to a Friend, 1915]
In 1878, he "Spent three delightful days at the Lake--steamed around it, and visited Cascade Lake a mile beyond the western shore of Tahoe." [Source: Letter from John Muir to Strentzel family, from Genoa, Nevada, July 6, 1878, in The Life and Letters of John Muir by William Frederic Badè Chapter XIII Nevada, Alaska, and a Home 1878-1880. He wrote about "Lake Tahoe in Winter" in the San Francisco Bulletin in 1878, reprinted in Sierra Club Bulletin, May, 1900, Vol. 3, No. 2, pg. 119, in which he wrote: "Lake Tahoe is king of them all, not only in size, but in the surpassing beauty of its shores and waters. It seems a kind of heaven to which the dead lakes of the lowlands had come with their best beauty spiritualized." He also warned that logging "is being pushed so fervently from hyear to year, almost the entire basin must be stripped ere long of one of its most attractive features."
Muir circumnavigated Lake Tahoe by sail with a man named Parry in the summer of 1888, with his first camp being just north of Rubicon Point, visiting Emerald Bay, Cascade Lake, Fallen Leaf Lake, stopping for supplies on July 4th at Glenbrook, then on to Crystal Bay, Carnelian Bay, and ending at Tahoe City. At the end of this excursion, he left by train for Oregon and Washington.
Muir returned to Tahoe several other times in his life, enjoying its "delightful" beauty, and large brown and silver trout (average 11/2 lbs. but some larger) with "very fine flavor."
For the story of Muir's attempts to protect the Lake Tahoe region in forest preserves and as a national park, see Lankford, Scott, "John Muir: Tahoe National Park," Chapter 8 in Tahoe Beneath the Surface: The Hidden Stories of America's Largest Mountain Lake. ( jointly published by Berkeley, Heyday and Rocklin, Sierra College Press, 1910.
See also Tahoe: From Timber Barons to Ecologists by Douglas H. Strong (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984.
Mono Lake
Muir wrote in a letter to Emily O. Pelton, in 1870 describing this huge lake east of the Sierra: "I never beheld a place where beauty was written in plainer characters or where the tender fostering hand of the Great Gardener was more directly visible."