From Dean Ohlman on July 24, 2011

Let the rivers clap their hands, let the mountains sing together for joy; let them sing before the LORD, for he comes to judge the earth. He will judge the world in righteousness and the peoples with equity (Psalm 98:8-9)

For the past two days I have roamed Yosemite, from the Valley floor to Glacier Point, from its grand monoliths to its towering sequoias. I tried to imagine John Muir discovering this grandeur for the first time—and tried to imagine it without the teeming masses of people, cars, and buses. Fortunately the features here are so outrageously large and awesome that except when you are on the crowded roads, the visitors shrink to ant-like columns of which you are a tiny part: creating a double—and proper—humility.

Israel has few of such grand features, yet its musicians were led to pen psalms about what they saw and experienced from the hand of the Creator. No wonder so many of John Muir’s writings sound like psalms. Below I let Muir speak from his article on preserving national parks and forests. I’ve added some of my photos to this celebration—knowing full well that Yosemite is one place where a photo can only hint at the grand realities that flood the senses:

Yosemite Park is a place of rest, a refuge from the roar and dust and weary, nervous, wasting work of the lowlands, in which one gains the advantages of both solitude and society. Nowhere will you find more company of a soothing peace-be- still kind. Your animal fellow-beings, so seldom regarded in civilization, and every rock-brow and mountain, stream, and lake, and every plant soon come to be regarded as brothers; even one learns to like the storms and clouds and tireless winds.
[Click on the photos to see them larger—keeping in mind that photos of Yosemite fail miserably to capture the awe it creates when you visit.]

As long as I live, I’ll hear waterfalls and birds and winds sing. I’ll interpret the rocks, learn the language of flood, storm, and the avalanche. I’ll acquaint myself with the glaciers and wild gardens, and get as near the heart of the world as I can.

Wander a whole summer if you can. Thousands of God’s blessings will search you and soak you as if you were a sponge, and the big days will go by uncounted. If you are business-tangled and so burdened by duty that only weeks can be got out of the heavy laden year, give a month at least. The time will not be taken from the sum of life. Instead of shortening, it will indefinitely lengthen it and make you truly immortal.

This one noble park is big enough and rich enough for a whole life of study and aesthetic enjoyment. It is good for everybody, no matter how benumbed with care, encrusted with a mail of business habits like a tree with bark. None can escape its charms. Its natural beauty cleans and warms like a fire, and you will be willing to stay forever in one place like a tree.

One day’s exposure to mountains is better than cartloads of books. See how willingly Nature poses herself upon photographers’ plates. No earthly chemicals are so sensitive as those of the human soul.

The mountains are fountains of men as well as of rivers, of glaciers, of fertile soil. The great poets, philosophers, prophets, able men whose thoughts and deeds have moved the world, have come down from the mountains—mountain dwellers who have grown strong there with the forest trees in Nature’s workshops.

Few are altogether deaf to the preaching of pine trees. Their sermons on the mountains go to our hearts; and if people in general could be got into the woods, even for once, to hear the trees speak for themselves, all difficulties in the way of forest preservation would vanish.