Lately as I’ve been in critical identity crisis, due to the fact that the wild around me is literally burnt to a blackened crisp, and will be for quite some time, I am spending some healing time through retrospection. I’m poring over old photos of myself in the wild, remembering those vibrant wilderness times when I thrived, sometimes even with knitting involved.
In the High Sierras, late 90’s, me, knitting in the wild even way back then, while relaxing in in the late afternoon with knitting, coffee, and wilderness. . . all together is just about as good as it gets , and a real defining concept for me. I discovered this photo of my first ever wild-knitted thing, a colorful hat, and in posting it here it is somehow brought back to life…
The old beloved hat I had knit probably 15 years earlier, was packed in my backpack every trip to the Sierras, for those very cold late afternoons when the sun has dropped enough to leave only shadow in the camp, and the chilly evenings and downright frigid mornings at altitude.  I lost it on a ski slope somewhere in the Sierras, and can you imagine how sad that was! Ah, but to lose a hat on a mountain trail is a noble loss indeed. I am sure someone found it and took it home with them.
Knitting in the Canadian wilderness, perched over a wild stream, in 2005…
Well, anyway, I have been renewing my love for the wild lately, walking every day, though maybe not quite as I once was. But yes I was, then and now, a definite Knitter Of The Wild, and I suppose if ever there was one thing that would define me in a single sentence, well, that just may be it.
We have been walking through the morning hours of Autumn.  Miles of yarn and prints of dog paws, and shoes, side by side. More chaotically spaced actually, mine straight forward, destination ahead, focused on the rounds of lace, of sleeves, of precious warm cardigans, and Emma’s  prints with her own agenda, as the wild life is speaking to her and new smells are exciting her in zig-zag directions and renewed vigor giving her incentive to come up to the peak with me these days.
Our walks journey through Autumn,  with the arrival of rain, we seem to be experiencing  a gradual awakening of our dormant selves,  as is with the succulent green mosses everywhere … our joy of joys.
To the peak we have walked a few times this Autumn already.  On the ridge right before the peak, like a comfortable old bed,  there is a soft pine needle layer from an eerie forest of stick-like old trees composting on the jutting toothy rock beneath … it is so dreamy to walk through, I just had to hang my knitting on it and be silly.
I so admire the man who found personal transformation and a sense of home deep in the wilderness of the High Sierra Nevada mountains, and fought to bring his experience of the territory into the lives of the general masses with his writing and activism. The masses who from a distance were readily destroying virgin wilderness with logging, mining, dam-building, and all manners of disregard in the turn of the last century. That man is John Muir, said to be the Father of Modern Environmentalism. That man is the man who made his home along the very lakes in the Sierra Nevada which I have camped, and who divided himself limb to limb to bring the High Sierra to the world, in attempt to protect it, its wildlife, the giant old-growth sequoias, and perfect beauty of the high mountain wilderness.
John Muir , born April 21, 1838 – died December 24, 1914,  was a Scottish-American naturalist & author, environmental philosopher and early advocate of preservation of wilderness in the United States. His letters, essays, and books telling of his adventures in nature, especially in the Sierra Nevada of California, have been read by millions. His activism helped to preserve the Yosemite Valley, Sequoia National Park, and other wilderness areas. The Sierra Club, which he founded, is a prominent American conservation organization. The 211-mile (340 km) John Muir Trail, a hiking trail in the Sierra Nevada was named in his honor. read more ….
Yosemite Valley, Â by Carleton Watkins, John Muir’s friend and photographer.
In case you didn’t know, I am an experienced hiker of John Muir territory, although it’s been a time since I’ve returned there. Â As a bit of proof, take photos below backpacking eight days along John Muir’s High Route, culminating on the peak of Mount Whitney in August of 2001.
Above photo is of  our group, Jeff directly behind me, all of us tired but totally and completely gratified.
And that’s me at the  Mount Whitney plaque , quite exhausted and glacier-burnt in the face,  from the epic trip but also from the push up from Guitar Lake that morning.   Mount Whitney was for that eight-day trek the end of the line,  and of the John Muir High Country Route.  I nearly am dumb-struck just to take in the scope of the majestic granite mountain, and to realize that I actually was at the top of it!
I could go on indefinitely about John Muir’s High Country, but let me not ramble too much on side-trails and back-story, and let me bring attention to this noble creature…
Wild mountain sheep!  In fact, the very wild sheep ( subspecies of ovis montana ) which inhabit the High Sierra and who’s tufts of downy wool Muir found and mused him to write a pithy chapter entitled “Wild Wool” from his publication Steep Trails.
“…pure wildness is the one great want, both of men and of sheep.”
” Give to Nature every cultured apple — codling, pippin, russet — and every sheep so laboriously compounded — muffled Southdowns, hairy Cotswolds, wrinkled Merinos — and she would throw the one to her caterpillars, the other to her wolves.”
“…and our wild sheep, wading in snow, roaming through bushes, and leaping among jagged storm-beaten cliffs, wears a dress so exquisitely adapted to its mountain life that it is always found as unruffled and stainless as a bird.”
excerpts from “Wild Wool” by John Muir
Visit Sierra Club archives to read“ Wild Wool “from John Muir’s “Steep Trails”, 1918
This is part one of a two-part post about John Muir, the High Sierra, and a new design which has come out of it. ( Stay tuned for Part Two forthcoming !) In the meantime, I hope you really do read Wild Wool  and acquaint yourself with some of John Muir’s writing of High Sierra Wilderness, and of the wild sheep.
