Gone are the days when a camper as blithe as Muir -- one friend wrote that the naturalist "knew less about camping than almost any man I have ever camped with" -- could walk for nearly two months across California with a plan like this:
"We had plenty of time and proposed drifting leisurely mountainward . . . by any road that we chanced to find; enjoying the flowers and light, 'camping out' in our blankets wherever overtaken by night, and paying very little compliance to roads or times."
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Wednesday, May 13, 2009 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 4 National Desk 1 inches; 37 words Type of Material: Correction
John Muir's trek: A map accompanying an article in Saturday's Section A about a Stanford University graduate student who is retracing the conservationist's 1868 trek from San Francisco to Yosemite Valley misspelled Millerton Lake as Mullerton Lake.
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McInturff spent a year plotting his adventure -- the route that might approximate Muir's, the places to sleep, the people to interview about the California landscape, the occasional ride for a side trip, the libraries whose Internet access would allow him to post to his blog. (McInturff's entries can be found at www.muirwalk.blogspot.)
He borrowed a one-man tent from his dad and a backpack from a friend. He packed one extra shirt, two pairs of socks, a rain shell and a first-aid kit that would be tapped regularly for blister relief.
Itineraries, directions and phone numbers were tucked into a Ziploc bag for protection from storms. McInturff brought a journal for observations and a well-worn copy of "Paradise Lost," a nod to Muir, who traveled with Milton's masterwork. McInturff also carried Muir's account of his California transect, an exuberant paean to the natural beauty of "the Great Central Plain."
Today, the Central Valley struggles with rampant growth, choking smog and high rates of poverty, unemployment and foreclosures. Even Muir rued that the region's charms are "fading like the glow of a sunset, -- foundering in the grossness of modern refinement."
But he was so awed by the profusion of wildflowers that he marked off a square yard and counted them. He found 7,262 in bloom, some purple, others a "pure, deep, bossy solar gold, as if the sun had filled their rays and flowerets with the undiluted substance of his very self."
Granted, McInturff was trekking a few weeks past full bloom, but on the busier byways of western Merced County in late April, about halfway through the trip, it was easier to catalog garbage than gold fields.
Heading east on California 152 before taking a sharp left on California 33 toward Gustine, McInturff scouted the highway's shoulder. Since leaving home, he had stumbled on a new Samsung cellphone and passed a generous scattering of mattresses.
