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Show 139 Getting lost does not solve one's problems, but it goes a long way toward resolving certain priorities. If the wilderness was a "pathless way," then Muir's own drifting was equally a "pathless way." There was no paradox in the expression, as he discovered, when suddenly on Mount Ritter he was given to see every rift and flaw of the rock. There was no paradox because Muir always knew that "the Sierra, instead of being a huge wrinkle of the earth's crust without any determinate structure, is built up of regularly formed stones like a work of art. . . . " Man's experience need be no more disordered than the mountains themselves. But a man had to be very careful. If the wilderness was on the one hand a pathless place because men had not set up any trail markers, it offered the possibility for following a more transcendent path, set up by the Creator himself. It is no surprise that Muir was never particularly fond of the stairway George Anderson proposed to build up the side of Half Dome. Not only did Muir suspect that such an artificial route was a grave error, but also he was not delighted with the prospect of its completion, when "all may sing excelsior in perfect safety." Then, the climbers of Half Dome would not be following the ways of the wilderness, but the ways of other roen. The same argument might be made about the John Muir Trail, it is an artificial route, and does not follow the glacial highways Muir was so fond of. |
