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As time dims the memory of his eclectic and adventurous life, John Muir will still forever be remembered as the man behind the creation of Yosemite National Park, and as the founder of the Sierra Club and the modern ecology movement.

But Muir was much more than an outdoorsman and a naturalist's naturalist. Among many other things he was also a teacher, a rancher, a mechanic, a shepherd, a geologist, a saw mill operator, an adventurer, an accomplished writer, and a prolific inventor.

Long a lover of nature and the outdoors, Muir arrived in Yosemite Valley at age 30, having traveled a circuitous route from Scotland to Wisconsin, then to California via a cross country hike through Florida.

Starting in Dunbar, Scotland, from his birth in 1838 until his family emigrated to Wisconsin in 1849, Muir's recollections of his childhood portended his outdoor life. In "The Story of My Boyhood and Youth" Muir wrote:

"When I was a boy in Scotland I was fond of everything that was wild, and all my life I've been growing fonder and fonder of wild places and wild creatures. Fortunately around my native town of Dunbar, by the stormy North Sea, there was no lack of wildness, though most of the land lay in smooth cultivation. With red-blooded playmates, wild as myself, I loved to wander in the fields to hear the birds sing, and along the seashore to gaze and wonder at the shells and seaweeds, eels and crabs in the pools among the rocks when the tide was low; and best of all to watch the waves in awful storms thundering on the black headlands and craggy ruins of the old Dunbar Castle when the sea and the sky, the waves and the clouds, were mingled together as one."

Muir continued his youth on the family's farm in Wisconsin. At age fifteen, he had become an avid reader of literature, and began inventing, in his own words, "water-wheels, curious doorlocks and latches, thermometers, hygrometers, pyrometers, clocks, a barometer, an automatic contrivance for feeding the horses at any required hour, a lamp-lighter and fire-lighter, an early-or-late-rising machine, and so forth."

Muir left the farm to seek his fortune entering his inventions in the State Fair in Madison, Wisconsin. His inventions opened many doors, but by and large he worked odd jobs, until, with great courage, he called on the President of the State University of Wisconsin, requesting permission to enroll. He must have been persuasive.

Of his studies, Muir wrote:

"Although I was four years at the University, I did not take the

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