The Man It's Named For

Stay with me here a spell. Ranger Boone Merrick, and now that you know how this place got its name, let me tell you about the man whose name it is — because John Muir never owned one inch of this canyon, and it's his forever anyway.

Picture a lean, bearded Scotsman, half wild himself, who came to California in eighteen sixty-eight and pretty much never came indoors again if he could help it. John Muir walked the Sierra Nevada with a crust of bread and a tin cup, slept out under the stars, climbed a hundred-foot fir in a windstorm just to feel the tree ride the gale, and wrote it all down in words that made people back east weep for country they'd never seen. He founded the Sierra Club. He walked the mountains of Yosemite with a president and talked him into saving them. More than any other soul in this nation's history, John Muir is the reason we have wild places set aside at all — the reason there is such a thing as a national park. The man was a conscience with a beard.

Now here's the tender part. When William Kent named this monument for him, in nineteen hundred and eight, Muir was an old man near the end of his road. And the honor moved him to the bone. He wrote Kent a letter of thanks, and I've read it, and it's a beautiful thing. He called this the best tree-lovers' monument that could possibly be found in all the forests of the world. This one. This little fog-soaked canyon you're standing in, out of all the mighty forests he had ever walked in a lifetime of walking. And then — this is the part that catches in my throat — he wrote that saving a place like this was a much needed lesson to the money-mad, hurrying world. From a dying man who'd given the world its wild.

So when you say the name of this place — Muir Woods — you're not naming the trees after a man who logged them or bought them or built here. You're naming them after a man who loved them, and who never asked for a thing but that they be left standing. He never did get to grow old in these woods. But every fog that rolls up this canyon says his name for him. Walk easy now. You're in good company.