Way back in 1868, John Muir crossed the San Francisco Bay to Oakland and started legging it to Yosemite. and on April 6, 2009, a 141 years later, Stanford Earth Sciences graduate and master’s student Alex McInturff is setting out to retrace John Muir’s walk to Yosemite National Park.

The trek was apparently inspired after one of his friends shared an essay from Muir’s ‘Rambles of a Botanist’. McInturff’s goal? To shed new light on the past and future of land conservation.

As the annual rush of visitors enroute to vacations in Yosemite Valley heats up, and buses and cars choc-a-bloc with tourist groups and vacationers make a beeline for Yosemite National Park hotels, McInturff will be walking 320 miles from San Francisco to the Yosemite Valley, a journey he expects to cover in about 32 days.

Along the way, he’ll be meeting and talking to land users, including farmers and government agencies.

John Muir was at the forefront of efforts to protect great swathes of the American West, including the Yosemite Valley, the Grand Canyon, and the Petrified Forest.

He founded the Sierra Club, and actively lobbied Washington as a conservationist. He is credited with the preservation of some 148 million acres of forest.

And Alex McInturff now wants to study how the Golden State has changed in the interim - In other words, his conclusions will be a report card on whether or not we have lived up to John Muir’s conservationist expectations, and what can be done to correct mistakes that have been made.

In a post on his Muirwalk blog, McInturff says that “On April 6, I will begin walking this transect, as part of research on land use and land management, past and present, in California. How has the land changed, from one side of the state of California to the other, since John Muir’s time? Muir was the man who put conservation on the map in many ways. What is the legacy of his effort?”

John Muir photo by cliff1066 via flickr (creative commons)

Posted on April 5th, 2009 by Thomas
Filed under: California