Excerpts
In the spring of 1868, less than a month before his 30th birthday, a wild-haired itinerant college-dropout by the name of John Muir, “with incredibly little money,” and no guidebook, stepped off a Panama steamer at the Port of San Francisco. He’d quit his job at a carriage parts shop the previous fall, had walked a thousand miles from Indianapolis to the Gulf of Mexico, “holding a generally southward course, like the birds when they are going from summer to winter.” He’d spent a few months in Cuba, looking at plants, had had a notion to go to South America—to wander up and then float back down the Amazon—but then crossed the Isthmus at Panama instead, and ended up in California...