This is the separate page for the Scenes 2.0 "NATURE" collection.
| Sierra Club Nature Collection | |
|---|---|
| Clements Mountain, Montana |
| © Steve Terrill, 1992 | |
| "Above this memorable spot, the face of the mountain is still more savagely hacked and torn. It is a maze of yawning chasms and gullies, in the angles of which rise beetling crags and piles of detached boulders that seem to have gotten ready to be launched below. But the strange influx of strength I had received seemed inexhaustible. I found a way without effort, and soon stood upon the topmost crag in the blessed light." John Muir | |
| Painted Hills, Oregon |
| © Keith Lazelle, 1989 | |
| "Who could ever guess that so rough a wilderness should yet be so fine, so full of good things. One seems to be in a majestic domed pavilion in which a grand play is being acted with scenery and music and incense all the furniture and action so interesting we are in no danger of being called on to endure one dull moment. God himself seems to be always doing his best here, working like a man in a glow of enthusiasm." John Muir | |
| Blue Ridge Parkway, Virginia |
| © David Muench, 1993 | |
| "The trees come pressing forward all around in close serried ranks, planting their feet exactly on its margin, and holding themselves erect, strict and orderly like soldiers on parade; thus bounding the meadow with exquisite precision, yet with free curving lines such as Nature alone can draw." John Muir | |
| Proxy Falls, Oregon |
| © Keith Lazelle, 1986 | |
| "How soothingly, restfully cool it is beneath that leafy, translucent ceiling, and how delightful the water music the deep bass tones of the fall, the clashing, ringing spray, and infinite variety of small low tones of the current gliding past the side of the boulder-island, and glinting against a thousand smaller stones down the ferny channel! All this shut in; every one of these influences acting at short range as if in a quiet room. The place seemed holy, where one might hope to see God." John Muir | |
| Alsek Glacier, Alaska |
| © Art Wolfe, Inc., 1991 | |
| "After the fiord was in shadow the level sunbeams continued to pour through the miles of bergs with ravishing beauty, reflecting and refracting the purple light like cut crystal. Then all save the tips of the highest became dead white. These, too, were speedily quenched, the glowing points vanishing like stars sinking beneath the horizon. And after the shadows had crept higher, submerging the glaciers and the ridges between them, the divine alpenglow still lingered on their highest fountain peaks as they stood transfigured in glorious array." John Muir | |
| Cirque of the Towers, Wyoming |
| © Pat O'Hara, 1982 | |
| "Thus the rocks, where the exposure to storms is greatest, and where only ruin seems to be the object, are all the more lavishly clothed upon with beauty that grows with and depends upon the violence of the gale. In like manner do men find themselves enriched by storms that seem only big with ruin, both in the physical and the moral worlds." John Muir | |
| Bryce Canyon, Utah |
| © Charles Krebs, 1992 | |
| "Gliding on and on, the scenery seemed at every turn to become more lavishly fruitful in forms as well as more sublime in dimensions." John Muir | |
| Cape Sebastian, Oregon |
| © Steve Terrill, 1992 | |
| "Nature is ever at work building and pulling down, creating and destroying, keeping everything whirling and flowing, allowing no rest but in rhythmical motion, chasing everything in endless song out of one beautiful form into another." John Muir | |
| Glacier Bay Region, Alaska |
| © Art Wolfe, Inc., 1987 | |
| "The inexperienced observer is oppressed by the incomprehensible grandeur, variety, and abundance of the mountains rising shoulder to shoulder beyond the reach of vision; and it is only after they have been studied one by one, long and lovingly, that their far-reaching harmonies become manifest. Then, penetrate the wilderness where you may, the main telling features, to which all the surrounding topography is subordinate, are quickly perceived and the most complicated clusters of peaks stand revealed harmoniously correlated and fashioned like works of art." John Muir | |
| Opal Creek, Oregon |
| © Steve Terrill, 1992 | |
| "In the spring, after all the avalanches are down and the snow is melting fast, it is glorious to hear the streams sing out on the mountains. Every fountain swelling, countless rills hurry together to the rivers at the call of the sun beginning to run and sing soon after sunrise, increasing until toward sundown, then gradually failing through the cold frosty hours of the night." John Muir | |
| White Mesa Arch, Arizona |
| © David Muench, 1993 | |
| "And our admiration must be excited again and again as we toil and study and learn that this vast job of rockwork, so far-reaching in its influences, was done by agents so fragile and small as are these flowers of the mountain clouds." John Muir | |
| Robin Lake, Washington |
| © Keith Lazelle, 1990 | |
| "As I lingered, gazing on the vast show, luminous shadowy clouds seemed to increase in glory of color and motion, now fondling the highest peaks with infinite tenderness of touch, now hovering above them like eagles over their nests." John Muir | |
| Death Valley National Monument, California |
| © Pat O'Hara, 1981 | |
| "But when we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with other stars all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty." John Muir | |
| Bunchberry Growing Out of Dead Tree |
| © Steve Terrill, 1992 | |
| "How fiercely, devoutly wild is Nature in the midst of her beauty-loving tenderness! Painting lilies, watering them, caressing them with gentle hand, going from flower to flower like a gardener while building rock mountains and cloud mountains full of lightning and rain." John Muir | |
| Lone Pine Peak, California |
| © Pat O'Hara, 1987 | |
| "In this flowery wilderness the bees rove and revel, rejoicing in the bounty of the sun, clambering eagerly through bramble and hucklebloom, ringing the myriad bells of the manzanita, now humming aloft among polleny willows and firs, now down on the ashy ground among gilias and buttercups, and anon plunging deep into showy banks of cherry and buckthorn. They consider the lilies and roll into them, and, like lilies, they toil not, for they are impelled by sun-power, as water-wheels by water-power; and when the one has plenty of high-pressure water, the other plenty of sunshine, they hum and quiver alike." John Muir | |
| Heart Lake, New York |
| © David Muench, 1993 | |
| "The making of gardens and parks goes on with civilization all over the world, and they increase both in size and number as their value is recognized. Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where Nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike. This natural beauty-hunger is made manifest in the little window-sill gardens of the poor, though perhaps only a geranium slip in a broken cup, as well as in the carefully tended rose and lily gardens of the rich, the thousands of spacious city parks and botanical gardens, and in our magnificent National parks." John Muir | |
| Maroon Bells-Snowmass Wilderness, Colorado |
| © Steve Terrill, 1992 | |
| "And how fondly they brood and hover over the gardens and forests with their cooling shadows and showers, keeping every petal and leaf in glad health and heart. One may fancy the clouds themselves are plants, springing up in the skyfields at the call of the sun, growing in beauty until they reach their prime, scattering rain and hail like berries and seeds, then wilting and dying." John Muir | |
| Monument Valley Tribal Park, Arizona |
| © David Muench, 1993 | |
| "Every rock in its walls seems to glow with life. Some lean back in majestic repose; others, absolutely sheer or nearly so for thousands of feet, advance beyond their companions in thoughtful attitudes, giving welcome to storms and calms alike, seemingly aware, yet heedless, of everything going on about them." John Muir | |
| Mt. Shuksan, Washington |
| © Keith Lazelle, 1990 | |
| "The small tributaries that do not reach back to the lasting snow fountains of the summit peaks shrink to whispering, tinkling currents. After the snow is gone from the basins, excepting occasional thunder-showers, they are now fed only by small springs whose waters are mostly evaporated in passing over miles of warm pavements, and in feeling their way slowly from pool to pool through the midst of boulders and sand. Even the main rivers are so low they may easily be forded, and their grand falls and cascades, now gently and approachable, have waned to sheets of embroidery." John Muir | |
| Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming |
| © Pat O'Hara, 1982 | |
| "And after ten years of wandering and wondering in the heart of it, (I still rejoice) in its glorious floods of light, the white beams of the morning streaming through the passes, the noonday radiance on the crystal rocks, the flush of the alpenglow, and the irised spray of countless waterfalls." John Muir | |
| Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, Arizona |
| © Pat O'Hara, 1987 | |
| "So extravagant is Nature with her choicest treasures, spending plant beauty as she spends sunshine, pouring it forth into land and sea, garden and desert. And so the beauty of lilies falls on angels and men, bears and squirrels, wolves and sheep, birds and bees." John Muir | |
| Cherokee National Forest, Tennessee |
| © Pat O'Hara, 1991 | |
| "The busy clouds drooped and condensed or dissolved to misty gauze - leaving here and there some lofty headland cut off from all visible connection with the walls, looming alone, dim, spectral, as if belonging to the sky." John Muir | |
| Red Rock Crossing, Arizona |
| © Charles Krebs, 1992 | |
| "Everything awakening alert and joyful; the birds begin to stir and innumerable insect people. Deer quietly withdraw into leafy hiding-places in the chaparral; the dew vanishes, flowers spread their petals, every pulse beats high, every life cell rejoices, the very rocks seem to thrill with life. The whole landscape glows like a human face in a glory of enthusiasm, and the blue sky, pale around the horizon, bends peacefully down over all like one vast flower." John Muir | |
| White Sands, New Mexico |
| © Keith Lazelle, 1989 | |
| "For the clouds are ripe, the meadows of the sky are in bloom and shed their radiant blossoms like an orchard in the spring. Lightly, lightly they lodge in the brown grasses and in the tasseled needles of the pines, falling hour after hour, day after day, silently, lovingly all the winds hushed glancing and circling hither, thither, glinting against one another, rays interlocking in flakes as large as daisies; and then the dry grasses, and the trees, and the stones are equally abloom again." John Muir | |
| Trussum Pond, Sussex County, Delaware |
| © Steve Terrill, 1992 | |
| "There is always something deeply exciting, not only in the sounds of winds in the woods, which exert more or less influence over every mind, but in their varied waterlike flow as manifested by the movements of the trees." John Muir | |
| Mt. Hood, Oregon |
| © Steve Terrill, 1992 | |
| "Thus, by forces seemingly antagonistic and destructive, has Mother Nature accomplished her beneficent designs now a flood of fire, now a flood of ice, now a flood of water; and at length an outburst of organic life, a milky way of snowy petals and wings, girdling the rugged mountain like a cloud, as if the vivifying sunbeams beating against its sides had broken into a foam of plant-bloom and bees, as sea-waves break and bloom on a rock shore." John Muir | |
| Naiad Lake, Washington |
| © Keith Lazelle, 1986 | |
| "The rocks - though beautiful in their combinations and collocations of curves and peaks, inflowing and touching delicately, and rising in bold, picturesque groups, are, nevertheless, intensely desolate-looking for want of trees, shrubs, or vegetation dense enough to give color in telling quantities visible at a distance." John Muir | |
| Fall Trees and Pond, Maine |
| © Steve Terrill, 1992 | |
| "The influences of pure nature seem to be so little known as yet, that it is generally supposed that complete pleasure of this kind, permeating one's very flesh and bones, unfits the student for scientific pursuits in which cool judgment and observation are required. But the effect is just the opposite. Instead of producing a dissipated condition, the mind is fertilized and stimulated and developed like sun-fed plants." John Muir | |
| Lower Yosemite Falls, California |
| © Keith Lazelle, 1984 | |
| "As it sways and sings in the wind, clad in gauzy, sun-sifted spray, half falling, half floating, it seems infinitely gentle and fine; but the hymns it sings tell the solemn fateful power beneath its soft clothing." John Muir | |
| Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona |
| © Pat O'Hara, 1982 | |
| "How deathlike is sleep in this mountain air, and quick the awakening into newness of life! A calm dawn, yellow and purple, then floods of sun-gold, making everything tingle and glow." John Muir | |
| Hoh Rain Forest, Washington |
| © Pat O'Hara, 1990 | |
| "Here indeed is the tree-lover's paradise; the woods, dry and wholesome, letting in the light in shimmering masses of half sunshine, half shade; the night air as well as the day air indescribably spicy and exhilarating; plushy fir-boughs for campers; beds, and cascades to sing us to sleep." John Muir | |
| Madrona Leaves on Sandstone, Washington |
| © Keith Lazelle, 1987 | |
| "In tranquil, mellow autumn, when the year's work is about done and the fruits are ripe, birds and seeds out of their nests, and all of the landscape is glowing like a benevolent countenance, then the streams are at their lowest ebb, with scarce a memory left of their wild spring floods." John Muir | |
| Blue Ridge Parkway, North Carolina |
| © David Muench, 1993 | |
| "Though of such stupendous depth, these canyons are not gloomy gorges, savage and inaccessible. With rough passages here and there they are flowery pathways conducting to the snowy, icy fountains; mountain streets full of life and light, graded and sculptured by the ancient glaciers, and presenting throughout all their courses a rich variety of novel and attractive scenery." John Muir | |
| Letchworth State Park, New York |
| © Steve Terrill, 1992 | |
| "Emerging from this last canyon the stream glides, in flat, lace-like folds, down a smooth incline into a small pool where it seems to rest and compose itself before taking the grand plunge. Then calmly, as if leaving a lake, it slips over the polished lip of the pool down another incline and out over the brow of the precipice in a magnificent curve thick-sown with rainbow spray." John Muir | |
| Denali National Park, Alaska |
| © Art Wolfe, 1981 | |
| "Then, warned by the sky, wide-awake mountaineers, together with the deer and most of the birds, make haste to the lowlands or foothills; and burrowing marmots, mountain beavers, wood-rats, and other small mountain people, go into winter quarters, some of them not again to see the light of day until the general awakening and resurrection of the spring in June or July." John Muir | |
| Seal Rock, Oregon |
| © Steve Terrill, 1992 | |
| "Tracing shining ways through fiord and sound, past forests and waterfalls, islands and mountains and far azure headlands, it seems as if surely we must at length reach the very paradise of the poets, the abode of the blessed." John Muir | |
| Flying Eagle Arch, Utah |
| © David Muench, 1993 | |
| "No rock landscape is more varied in sculpture, none more delicately modeled than these landscapes of the sky; domes and peaks rising, swelling, white as finest marble and firmly outlined, a most impressive manifestation of world building. Every rain-cloud, however fleeting, leaves its mark, not only on trees and flowers whose pulses are quickened, and on the replenished streams and lakes, but also on the rocks are its marks engraved whether we can see them or not." John Muir | |
| Mt. Robson, British Columbia |
| © Keith Lazelle, 1991 | |
| "Now flowing on smooth pavements in sheets thin as glass, now diving under willows and laving their red roots, oozing through green, plushy bogs, splashing over small falls and dancing down slanting cascades, calming again, gliding through patches of smooth glacier meadows with sod of alpine agrostis mixed with blue and white violets and daisies, breaking, tossing among rough boulders and fallen trees, resting in calm pools, flowing together until, all united, they go to their fate with stately, tranquil gestures like a full-grown river." John Muir | |
| Badlands National Park, South Dakota |
| © Pat O'Hara, 1992 | |
| "Standing here in the deep, brooding silence all the wilderness seems motionless, as if the work of creation were done. But in the midst of this outer steadfastness we know there is incessant motion and change." John Muir | |
| Columbia River Gorge, Oregon |
| © Steve Terrill, 1992 | |
| "The big river has just room enough to flow and roar obscurely, here and there groping its way as best it can, like a weary, murmuring, overladen traveler trying to escape from the tremendous, bewildering labyrinthic abyss, while its roar serves only to deepen the silence. Instead of being filled with air, the vast space between the walls is crowded with Nature's grandest buildings a sublime city of them, painted in every color, and adorned with richly fretted cornice and battlement spire and tower in endless variety of style and architecture." John Muir | |
| Fall Foliage, Maine |
| © Steve Terrill, 1992 | |
| "It was in the Indian summer, when the leaf colors were ripe and the great cliffs and domes were transfigured in the hazy golden air. The voice of fall was now low, and the grand spring and summer floods had waned to sifting, drifting gauze and thin-broidered folds of linked and arrowy lace-work." John Muir | |
| Crested Butte Mountain, Colorado |
| © Steve Terrill, 1992 | |
| "How delightful it is, and how it makes one's pulses bound to get back into this reviving northland wilderness! How truly wild it is, and how joyously one's heart responds to the welcome it gives, its waters and mountains shining and glowing like enthusiastic human faces!" John Muir | |
| Mono Lake, California |
| © Charles Krebs, 1992 | |
| "Nature's sublime wonderlands, the admiration and joy of the world." John Muir | |
| Mt. Robson, British Columbia |
| © Keith Lazelle, 1991 | |
| "At the touch of this divine light, the mountains seemed to kindle to a rapt, religious consciousness, and stood hushed and waiting like devout worshippers." John Muir | |
| Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park, Utah |
| © Pat O'Hara, 1988 | |
| "One is constantly reminded of the infinite lavishness and fertility of Nature's inexhaustible abundance amid what seems enormous waste. And yet when we look into any of her operations that lie within reach of our minds, we learn that no particle of her material is wasted or worn out. It is eternally flowing from use to use, beauty to yet higher beauty; and we soon cease to lament waste and death, and rather rejoice and exult in the imperishable, unspendable wealth of the universe, and faithfully watch and wait the reappearance of everything that melts and fades and dies about us, feeling sure that its next appearance will be better and more beautiful than the last." John Muir | |
| Sawtooth Wilderness, Idaho |
| © Pat O'Hara, 1982 | |
| "Early in the forenoon the clouds had lifted and the sun had come out, revealing a host of noble mountains, grandly sculptured and composed, and robed in spotless white, some of the highest adorned with streamers of mealy snow wavering in the wind a truly glorious spectacle." John Muir | |
| Zion National Park, Utah |
| © Pat O'Hara, 1980 | |
| "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. One fancies a heart like our own must be beating in every crystal and cell, and we feel like stopping to speak to the plants and animals as friendly fellow mountaineers. Nature as poet, and enthusiastic workingman, becomes more and more visible the farther and higher we go; for the mountains are fountains beginning places, however related to sources beyond mortal ken." John Muir | |
| Fall Foliage, Vermont |
| © Steve Terrill, 1992 | |
| "A grand, red, rosy, crimson day a perfect glory of a day. What it means I don't know. It is the first marked change from tranquil sunshine with purple mornings and evenings and still, white noons." John Muir | |