Will Explore Cold Siberia [sic].

• Main Author: Muir, John
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: Scholarly Commons 1983
• Subjects: Environmentalist; naturalist; travel; conservation; national parks; John Muir; history; pamphlets; journal articles; speeches; writing; annotation; Norway; Hearst; glacier; Alaska; Siberia
• Online Access: https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/jmb/644; https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/context/jmb/article/1643/viewcontent/A34.pdf

CLIPPING FROM THE MUIR COLLECTION (Bailey Millard, Hearst journalist and Muir admirer, wrote this tribute for the San Francisco Examiner, March 29, 1903, on the eve of Muir's round-the-world excursion. It probably embarrassed Muir and infuriated his testy friend John Burroughs.) WILL EXPLORE COLD SIBERA In his sixty-fifth year, and still as sturdy a mountain climber as when he discovered the great Alaska glacier which bears his name, John Muir, who has carefully explored all the wildest and most inaccessible places in our land where Nature hides herself away in secret beauty, and who has sailed the fiords of coldest Norway and the coral-lined coves of warmest Polynesia, is making his studies of peaks and the structure of plants, is now preparing to go farther afield than ever before. He is going to explore the forests of Sibera and Manchuria in company with Sargent, the tree man, who wrote that extensive "Silva of North America," in fourteen enormous volumes. Muir will leave his home at Martinez about the 15th of May and will join Sargent in New York. They will then sail for Europe and take the Transsiberian Railway and journey across the great steppes to that rare country which is said to be of all wilderness the most howling. Mr. Sargent shows the sapiency of the scientist in uniting his fortunes^ with Muir, whose woodcraft is probably superior to that of any other man in America. Muir is a man whom no prospective hardship can frighten, except, possible, crushing through a street crowd, for he always prefers to walk on a glacial pavement to one on the concrete. He thinks nothing of starting out on a fortnight's tramp in the high Sierras with no other equipment than a bag of bread, a tincup and a handful of tea. In fact, that meager provision proved sufficient for him in all his hardest tramps, and hemakes light of some of his most wearisome and stupendous tasks. Clarence King, after long and careful preparation, climbed to the top of Mount Tyndall and afterward wrote of his awful perils and narrow escapes ...