“A man who works with his hands is a laborer;
a man who works with his hands and his brain is a craftsman;
but a man who works with his hands and his brain and his heart is an artist”
  Louis Nizer quotes

Mountainsmith Lookout 45 Ski/ Snowboard Backpack (Recycled)

The Mountainsmith Lookout 45 Ski/ Snowboard Backpack (Recycled) is the perfect weekend size with a host of features to cover everything from your next hut trip to that off-route canyon hike. Separate sleeping bag compartment, detachable top lid, and options for snowboard/ski carry round out the package. With up to 53 liters of carrying capacity, this weekend warrior will keep you fast and light through the wilderness. Made with 450d ReDura, the Lookout 45 utilizes 20 recycled plastic bottles. Save the planet, go backpacking!

Mountainsmith Falcon 55 Backpack (Recycled)

NEW FOR 2010! The do-it-all backcountry Falcon 55 Backpack (Recycled) from Mountainsmith is designed for extended wilderness trips with a host of features to cover everything from mountaineering to canyoneering and everything in between. Separate sleeping bag compartment, detachable top lid, and options for snowboard/ski carry round out the package. With up to 60L of carrying capacity, this multi-day adventure pack can handle anything you throw at it. Made with 450d ReDura, the Falcon 55 utilizes 22 recycled plastic 16-ounce bottles. Save the planet, go backpacking!

The Wilderness World of John Muir

During John Muir's extraordinary life as a conservationist, he traveled through most of the American wilderness alone and on foot, without a gun or a sleeping bag. In 1903, while on a three-day camping trip with President Theodore Roosevelt, he convinced the president of the importance of a national conservation program, and he is given major credit for saving the Grand Canyon and Arizona's Petrified Forest. Muir's writing, based on journals he kept throughout his life, gives our generation a picture of an America still wild and unsettled only one hundred years ago. Edwin Way Teale has collected here the best of Muir's writing, selected from all of his major works, including MY FIRST SUMMER IN THE SIERRA and TRAVELS IN ALASKA. THE WILDERNESS WORLD OF JOHN MUIR provides "reading that is often magnificent, thrilling, exciting, breathtaking, and awe-inspiring" (Kirkus Reviews).

John Muir

From his early childhood in Dunbar, Scotland, through his wilderness wanderings in the American West, John Muir has always been surrounded by natural beauty. Muir was able to use his love for nature to become a famed naturalist and advocate for wilderness preservation. His work and influence would lead to the establishment of Yosemite National Park and the Sierra Club, which began in 1892, making it the oldest environmental organization in the United States. Using Muir's own words, this book looks at the events that shaped Muir's life and examines the development of his worldview, his love of nature, and his passion for preservation.

A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir

"I am hopelessly and forever a mountaineer," John Muir wrote. "Civilization and fever and all the morbidness that has been hooted at me has not dimmed my glacial eye, and I care to live only to entice people to look at Nature's loveliness. My own special self is nothing." In Donald Worster's magisterial biography, John Muir's "special self" is fully explored as is his extraordinary ability, then and now, to get others to see the sacred beauty of the natural world. A Passion for Nature is the most complete account of the great conservationist and founder of the Sierra Club ever written. It is the first to be based on Muir's full private correspondence and to meet modern scholarly standards. Yet it is also full of rich detail and personal anecdote, uncovering the complex inner life behind the legend of the solitary mountain man. It traces Muir from his boyhood in Scotland and frontier Wisconsin to his adult life in California right after the Civil War up to his death on the eve of World War I. It explores his marriage and family life, his relationship with his abusive father, his many friendships with the humble and famous (including Theodore Roosevelt and Ralph Waldo Emerson), and his role in founding the modern American conservation movement. Inspired by Muir's passion for the wilderness, Americans created a long and stunning list of national parks and wilderness areas, Yosemite most prominent among them. Yet the book also describes a Muir who was a successful fruit-grower, a talented scientist and world-traveler, a doting father and husband, a self-made man of wealth and political influence. A man for whom mountaineering was "a pathway to revelation and worship." For anyone wishing to more fully understand America's first great environmentalist, and the enormous influence he still exerts today, Donald Worster's biography offers a wealth of insight into the passionate nature of a man whose passion for nature remains unsurpassed.