John Muir's Yosemite Earthquake Encounter

Good morning. It’s March 26. On this day in 1872, John Muir had only a notebook with him when a violent earthquake shook California’s Owens Valley. And his prose was better than most people’s pictures.

John Muir was sleeping, as were most people, when the San Andreas Fault shifted violently at 2:30 a.m. The temblor, which was felt all the way from Tijuana to Southern Oregon, damaged or destroyed 52 of the 59 residences of the rural California town of Lone Pine, where 27 people died in their beds.

When the earthquake hit, the famed conservationist was in a cabin behind a place called Black’s Hotel. Muir's marvelous reaction, documented in his journal, reveals a man with the heart of a naturalist and the instincts of a police reporter.

“In Yosemite Valley, one morning about two o'clock I was aroused by an earthquake,” he wrote. “And though I had never before enjoyed a storm of this sort, the strange, wild thrilling motion and rumbling could not be mistaken, and I ran out of my cabin, near the Sentinel Rock, both glad and frightened, shouting, ‘A noble earthquake!’ feeling sure I was going to learn something.”

Muir described the sensation so vividly his readers could imagine they were there, too:

“The shocks were so violent and varied, and succeeded one another so closely, one had to balance in walking as if on the deck of a ship among the waves, and it seemed impossible the high cliffs should escape being shattered.”

Fearing that 3,000-foot-high Sentinel Rock would come tumbling down, Muir took shelter behind a huge pine tree, hoping it would protect him from any stray boulders. Suddenly, in the dark amid the “strange silence and strange motion,” he reported hearing a tremendous roar. This was the collapse of a geological formation called Eagle Rock, higher up the valley.

Muir’s description of the ensuing destruction could only come from an observer who appreciated nature not only for its glory, but for its destructive power as well.

“I saw it falling in thousands of the great boulders I had been studying so long,” he noted, “pouring to the valley floor in a free curve luminous from friction, making a terribly sublime and beautiful spectacle - an arc of fire fifteen hundred feet span, as true in form and as steady as a rainbow, in the midst of the stupendous roaring rock-storm.”