Born in Scotland in 1838, Muir immigrated to Wisconsin with his family when he was 11 years old.... Muir first visited Yosemite in 1868.... In 1889, Muir took Robert Underwood Johnson, editor of Century Magazine, to Tuolumne Meadows so he could see how sheep were damaging the land. Muir convinced Johnson that the area could only be saved if it was incorporated into a national park. Johnson’s publication of Muir’s exposés sparked a bill in the U.S. Congress that proposed creating a new federally administered park surrounding the old Yosemite Grant. Yosemite National Park became a reality in 1890.... The last 25 years of Muir’s life were consumed with constant travel, writing, and oversight of the Sierra Club—for which he served as president from its creation in 1892. —National Park Service

"The battle we have fought, and are still fighting for the forests is a part of the eternal conflict between right and wrong, and we cannot expect to see the end of it. ... So we must count on watching and

striving for these trees, and should always be glad to find anything so surely good and noble to strive for."

"If one pine were placed in a town square, what admiration it would excite! Yet who is conscious of the pine-tree multitudes in the free woods, though open to everybody?"

"The snow is melting into music."

"There is not a 'fragment' in all nature, for every relative fragment of one thing is a full harmonious unit in itself."

"Keep close to Nature's heart... and break clear away, once in a while, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean."

"God never made an ugly landscape. All that the sun shines on is beautiful, so long as it is wild."

"One touch of nature makes all the world kin."

"In God's wildness lies the hope of the world - the great fresh unblighted, unredeemed wilderness. The galling harness of civilization drops off, and wounds heal ere we are aware."

"Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness. All other travel is mere dust and hotels and baggage and chatter."

"Most people are on the world, not in it—have no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them—undiffused, separate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching but separate."

"The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness."

[You can read more about Yosemite and its history at the National Park Service website. The captions above, all taken from the writings of John Muir, can be found at the Sierra Club website. There are many wonderful photographers on Flickr who have shared their work that features the park and other gorgeous natural landscapes. Please check out the images provided by Frozen Coffee, Vishnu V, martapiqs, Dave R, Loyd Schutte, Justin Ennis, Jim Bahn and David (randomcuriosity)].