John Muir

After a one-month hiatus from pledging this and that, I have a plan for this blog the following month: to explore the Sierra by learning about the flora and fauna, document what I see with photos, continue my very first pledge to read John Muir’s My First Summer in the Sierra, and share what I discover on this blog. I visited many of the places John Muir marveled at in his book and will provide photos, information, and his writings about them. Today is dedicated to all the meadows out there, particularly Tuolumne, the most beautiful meadow I’ve ever encountered.

 Taken September 4, 2011. You can see that it's located towards the Eastern side of the Sierras, at about 8600 feet.

And here are John Muir’s musings from August 9, 1869:

 “The big Tuolumne Meadows are flowery lawns, lying along the south fork of the Tuolumne River at a height of about eighty-five hundred to nine thousand feet above the sea, partially separated by forests and bars of glaciated granite. Here the mountains seem to have been cleared away or set back, so that wide-open views may be had in every direction… This is the most spacious and delightful high pleasure-ground I have yet seen. The air is keen and bracing, yet warm during the day, and though lying high in the sky, the surrounding mountains are so much higher, one feels protected as if in a grand hall. Mts. Dana and Gibbs, massive red mountains, perhaps thirteen thousand feet high or more, bound the view on the east, the Cathedral and Unicorn Peak, with many nameless peaks, on the south, and Hoffman Range on the west, and a number of peaks unnamed, as far as I know, on the north. One of these last is much like the Cathedral.”

See the picture above to spot the reddish mountains of Dana and Gibbs. 

“The grass of the meadows is mostly fine and silky, with exceedingly slender leaves, make a close sod, above which the panicles of minute purple flowers seem to float in airy, misty lightness, while the sod is enriched with at least three species of gentian and as many or more of orthocarpus, potentilla, ivesia, solidago, pentstemon, wither their gay colors—purple, blue, yellow, and red--- all of which I may know better ere long. A central camp will probably be made in this region.”

I spotted a couple of prairie dogs scampering through these grasses. They took a moment of their busy afternoon to stare back at me. Can you make them out? Of course they blend in very well…

As I was there a month later, I didn’t catch any of the wildflowers, but here are some photos of each that Muir mentions that I found on the internet:

 Orthocarpus, aka Owl's Clover:

Potentilla:

Ivesia:

Solidago:

Pentstemon:

Muir wrote of meadows in general: “I found three kinds of meadows: (1) Those contained in basins not yet filled with earth enough to make a dry surface. They are planted with several species of carex, and have their margins diversified with robust flowering plants such as veratrum, larkspur, lupine, etc. (2) Those contained in the same sort of basins, once lakes like the first, but so situated in relation to the streams that flow through them and beds of transportable sand, gravel, etc. that they are now high and dry and well drained. This dry condition and corresponding difference in their vegetation may be caused by no superiority of position, or power of transporting filling material in the streams that belong to them, but simply by the basin being shallow and therefore sooner filled. They are planted with grasses, mostly fine, silky, and rather short-leaved, Calamagrostis and Agrostis being the principal genera. They form delightfully smooth, level sods in which one finds two or three species of gentian and as many purple and yellow orthocarpus, violet, vaccinium, kalmia, bryanthus, and lonicera. (3) Meadows hanging on ridge and mountain slopes, not in basins at all, but made and held in place by masses of boulders and fallen trees, which, forming dams one above another in close succession on small, outspread, channelless streams, have collected soil enough for the growth of grasses, carices, and many flowering plants, and being kept well watered, without being subject to currents sufficiently strong to carry them away, a hanging or sloping meadow is the result. Their surfaces are seldom so smooth as the others, being roughened more or less by the projecting tops of the dam rocks or logs; but at a little distance this roughness is not noticed, and the effect is very striking, bright green, fluent, down-sweeping flowery ribbons on gray slopes… How wonderful must be the temper of the elastic leaves of grasses and sedges to make curves so perfect and fine. Tempered a little harder, they would stand erect, stiff and bristly, like strips of metal; a little softer, and every leaf would lie flat. And what fine painting and tinting there is on the glumes and pales, stamens and feathery pistils. Butterflies colored like the flowers waver above them in wonderful profusion, and many other beautiful winged people, numbered and known and loved only by the Lord, are waltzing together high over head, seemingly in pure play and hilarious enjoyment of their little sparks of life. How wonderful they are! How do they get a living, and endure the weather? How are their little bodies, with muscles, nerves, organs, kept warm and jolly in such admirable exuberant health? Regarded only as mechanical inventions, how wonderful they are! Compared with these, Godlike man’s greatest machines are as nothing.”

I agree!

It is pretty apparent that Tuolumne Meadows is classified as a (2) meadow: in a basin, dry with a well-defined and well-formed river/creek running through it (Tuolumne River to be exact), and covered in grasses. But leaving behind names and classifications, it’s simply one of the prettiest phenomena on the planet. Enjoy the photos and I hope you can get yourself there someday, too.