Steep Trails

Steep Trails gathers John Muir's unpublished essays, written during his decades of wandering through the Sierra Nevada, Mount Shasta, and the Great Basin. These are not polished nature meditations but urgent field dispatches from a man who climbed mountains in storms and slept beneath ancient sequoias. Here is Muir watching a violent night crackle across Shasta's summit, stumbling upon Nevada's ghost towns, and quietly observing Northern Paiute families harvesting pine nuts in ways that would vanish within decades. The prose crackles with his characteristic religious fervor about wild places. Yet what haunts these pages is an unspoken elegy: Muir knew he was documenting landscapes being systematically destroyed by fire, axe, and plow. He was writing the obituary of American wilderness while it was still breathing. These trails are steep indeed, and the reader climbs them alongside a man who saw the last of something irreplaceable.