Yosemite Falls: Reckoning with California History and the Gospel of John Muir

In Daniel Duane’s childhood, John Muir was apostle and prophet, the man who taught Californians to love nature. Duane's family worshipped in the Muir way by backpacking, skiing, and climbing. They read the scripture, too, from Muir's earnest essays to the memoirs of the charismatic geologist Clarence King to classic accounts of Indigenous California. Paradise, for Duane's family, was Yosemite National Park. For Duane, though, devotional study of Yosemite meant confrontation with its nuanced, violent—and sometimes absurd—history.

In Yosemite Falls, Duane tells the story of his family and the park, populated by the characters of his own life and of California past. His beloved outdoorsman father, who taught him to climb and cast a long shadow. His mother, his wife, and his daughters, who all share his passion for the outdoors. Ishi, who in 1911 was the last living member of the Yahi people, taken in as an object of study by UC Berkeley. And Muir himself, whose messy biography and Victorian worldview forced Duane into a painful apostasy about California’s "great” men and their gospel of the wild. Yosemite Falls is a vital and exuberant correction to the canon, offering an idiosyncratic new history of wilderness in the Golden State, where white supremacy, cultural theft, and governmental overreach abound.

With wry humor and inimitable style, Duane has crafted a book that is both playful and moving, at once a memoir of life in the mountain west and a reckoning with the true legacies of his family’s ecological heroes.