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Show 229. turn back. FOUND IN A STORM There are some storms which test men to the limit of their endurance. If you spend enough time in the mountains you know that sooner or later you will have your turn with this kind of weather. For some, it is enough to survive. For Muir, such an occasion offered new possibilities for expansion of consciousness. Just as he could not resist entering a glacial womb or climbing a tree in a gale, so he could not resist experiencing the stuff out of which glaciers were made, the winter storm. He got his wish on Mount Shasta in November of 1874 and again on the last day of April in 1875. These storms must have seemed to him to betoken the beginning and end of winter. Laved in snow on both occasions, he sat out the first slightly below timberline after climbing the summit, and in April he met his storm on a summit bivouac. He wrote separately about these excursions in the 1870's and finally included both in one narrative for Picturesque California in 1888. The two storms were one in his mind; they embraced the snowy months. They suggested the sense of winter that he wanted to experience, a winter perhaps like the one which Thoreau spent at Walden, a deep winter when a man could measure the depth of his soul. In a hand-written note at the top of one version of the essay, Muir reminded himself of the place this |