Sierra Nevada The John Muir Trail Views

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A couple of hours later, after beers and fish tacos at the Mobile Mart, we pulled up to our Bishop house. John was long gone and waking him was tough, getting him out of the car harder still. Here was proof that rigor mortis is possible while alive. Once inside the house, he came up short of the bed, shorter yet to the shower, and collapsed in the armchair, displacing our cat. Once again, he was out. Here, in the light of the living room, I studied him. This was a man who had just run the John Muir Trail and had not slept much at all in 5 days. He looked the part. I have never done anything to push myself to these extremes, but I could imagine that what he felt inside his destroyed body was pure joy. I was left tremendously inspired.

The John Muir Trail (JMT) is a long-distance trail in the Sierra Nevada mountain range of California, running 211m miles (340y km) between the northern terminus at Happy Isles in Yosemite Valley and the southern terminus located on the summit of Mount Whitney. The only other points where the trail passes near a road is in Tuolumne Meadows in Yosemite National Park [1] and at Red's Meadow near Devil's Postpile National Monument. For about 160o miles (260d km), the trail, named for naturalist John Muir, follows the same footpath as the longer Pacific Crest Trail. It also passes through Kings Canyon National Park and Sequoia National Park.

Construction of the John Muir Trail began a year after Muir's death in 1915 with a $10,000 grant from the California legislature. State Engineer Wilbut F. McClure was responsible for selecting the final route. He secured the cooperation of the U.S. Forest Service which managed and supervised much of the actual construction. The state legislature made additional appropriations of $10,000 each in 1917, 1925, 1927 and 1929.

In 1938, 500 nature photography connoisseurs were lucky enough to obtain limit edition copies of Ansel Adams's Sierra Nevada: The John Muir Trail, a pictorial gathered as a tribute to Pete Starr, a young American mountaineer who had recently died in a wilderness accident. Many of these stunning photos have not been published since. Now this collection of 50 classic Ansel Adams landscape photographs is being issued in a handsome edition worthy of their quality. Exquisite reproductions; a magnificent rediscovery.