Guardians of the Valley: John Muir and the Friendship That Saved Yosemite

Bestseller King (Skeletons on the Zahara) probes the transformative partnership between a writer and an editor in this sparkling history. Naturalist John Muir, “the father of our national parks, founder of the Sierra Club, and spiritual leader of the environmental movement,” began working with Century Magazine editor Robert Underwood Johnson in 1877, but they didn’t meet in person until 1889, when they traveled from San Francisco to “the holy temple” of Yosemite Valley, where Muir’s “enthrallment with nature... his belief in its worth, power, and sacredness” had “crystallize[d]” 20 years earlier. But when Muir and Johnson visited, they saw a landscape devastated by damming, logging, grazing, mining, and tourism. Launching a preservation movement, the two “moved a mountain of greed and apathy” to have Yosemite declared a national park but lost the battle to save one of its most beautiful sections, Hetch Hetchy Valley, from being flooded to provide water to San Francisco. King vividly chronicles Muir’s evolution from “self-styled hobo” to forceful activist, goaded and nurtured by the “urbane” Johnson, and weaves in intriguing vignettes of Theodore Roosevelt, Poetry magazine founder Harriet Monroe, and others, as well as rhapsodic descriptions of the Sierra Nevada landscape. Fans of Ken Burns’s The National Parks documentary will cherish this inspired account of how an American treasure was saved. Photos. (Mar.)