Walking in the Shadow of Giants

My first night tracing John Muir’s 1875 trek through the heart of California’s giant sequoias led to a clean bed of disintegrated granite and a view of forested ridges beneath the High Sierra. A Muir-influenced simple dinner of bread, nuts, and cheese sufficed for the evening as I reflected on the differences in our experiences one hundred forty-six years apart. Muir certainly didn’t have a microbrew with him or even a PBR. I had both.

Not that a genuine reenactment of Muir’s journey was ever my goal. I knew that would be impossible in this day and age, and sort of goofy besides—traipsing along forest roads with a sack of stale bread and an obliging mule. Still, I envisioned a thru-hike in Muir’s footsteps, covering two hundred-some miles over several weeks and seeing some very awesome sequoia trees along the way. But as large swaths of the Sierra Nevada erupted into spectacular wildfires over consecutive summers, it became clear that my thru-hike was