May 19, 2025

Everyone needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and cheer and give strength to the body and soul alike. John Muir

When I headed to Yosemite National Park a couple of weeks ago, I expected spectacular scenery and strenuous hiking. I found both. But I also encountered something else that I did not anticipate: small-minded Sierra Club virtue signaling.

During my weeklong sojourn in the land of sheer granite cliffs, gushing waterfalls, and massive sequoia redwoods, my body was challenged by steep mountain trails and my spirit was lifted by roaring river rapids and plunging cascades of frothing white water drama. But my patience was tested by crowds of fellow visitors and by my own judgmental condemnation of judgmental environmentalists.

Yosemite is, unofficially, the first national park in the world, set aside for preservation in 1864 by the U.S. Congress and President Abraham Lincoln. Many others have contributed to its protection, including President Teddy Roosevelt, John Muir, and a friend of Muir’s named Joseph LeConte. John Muir founded the Sierra Club in 1892 and Joseph LeConte was an early director of it, so in 1903 the Sierra Club named its Yosemite Valley lodge after LeConte.

But in 2016 the Sierra Club discovered that Joseph LeConte and John Muir were human. LeConte had promoted white racial superiority, and in his youth Muir had said some unkind things about black people and American Indians. So the morally superior Sierra Club leadership decided that LeConte and Muir could not pass its ideological purity test, and it cancelled LeConte and removed his name from its lodge in the valley, as I learned when I went there. The Sierra Club zealots have not yet cancelled founder John Muir, but they have considered doing so.

To my knowledge Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt have not been condemned by the Sierra Club – yet. But in 2021 the San Francisco Board of Education attempted to rename schools named after both of those men and John Muir, as well as schools named for George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and others, for whatever transgressions offended the school board. So the Sierra Club is hardly alone in its politically correct pandering to current sensibilities.

But if we continue to insist upon judging historical figures by the latest standards of social conduct and etiquette, we will eventually realize that all of the heroes of the past – and present – are defective. And not just the heroes. I bet that if you could put the lives of the Sierra Club leadership and the Board of Education under a microscope, you’d find that every single man and woman of them is flawed in one way or another. Probably in several ways. Just like the rest of us.

So I decided that every day during my stay in the Sierras, the mountains that John Muir called the Range of Light, I would rise above the pettiness of the leftwing groupthink dogma and celebrate the magnificence of Yosemite that has been bequeathed to us by Muir, LeConte, Lincoln, Roosevelt, and other imperfect beings.

Every day in Yosemite I said prayers of appreciation to the sequoias or oaks and to the aforementioned defenders of its mountains and river and forests. Every day I gave back healing energy to Half Dome and El Capitan and the Merced River, as well as to Yosemite Falls, Bridalveil Falls, Vernal Falls, and Nevada Falls. Every day I touched some part of nature with my hands and said “Holy, holy, holy” and “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” Every day I gave thanks to Gaia for its healing energy, and gave thanks to what Muir called “the grandeur of the Yosemite temple.”

And here and now I leave you with three quotes from John Muir’s book My First Summer in the Sierra:

Who wouldn’t be a mountaineer! Up here all the world’s prizes seem nothing.

Nature’s inexhaustible abundance…is eternally flowing from use to use, beauty to yet higher beauty; and soon we cease to lament waste and death, and rather rejoice and exult in the imperishable, unspendable wealth of the universe, and faithfully watch and wait the reappearance of everything that melts and fades and dies about us, feeling sure that its next appearance will be better and more beautiful than the last.

I have crossed the Range of Light, surely the brightest and best of all the Lord has built; and rejoicing in its glory, I gladly, gratefully, hopefully pray I may see it again.