Mountains of Light: Seasons of Reflection in Yosemite by R. Mark Liebenow (review)

Like most books about Yosemite National Park Mountains of Light is a reworking of John Muir, most obviously My First Summer in the Sierra and The Mountains of California. Liebenow’s book, however, has an edge missing from nearly everything Muir wrote: Liebenow’s wife has died tragically young, and he turns to the park for solace. I had an unprecedented reaction as I started reading: my stomach turned over. The previous year I had suffered a loss remarkably similar and equally devastating and had turned to the same place for relief.

That place is a big one. I wanted to be alone and so went to relatively obscure Wawona and started climbing until the nearest human was miles away and I had no idea where I was. Liebenow rarely leaves Yosemite Valley itself, and its walls. Still, he and I ended up at approximately the same place. Like the Camino de Santiago and its symbol the scallop shell, with its converging ridges, there are many roads to the spiritual home Liebenow finds but only one destination. I of course cannot describe the destination here. Read the book. Much of what he finds will be unsurprising, simply described in words different from Muir’s. That said, the narrative has unexpected pleasures. Liebenow, who could probably afford to stay at the Lodge or even the Ahwahnee Hotel, instead—to his credit—camps during every trip and goes so far as to stay only at the frowzy, eccentric, famous Camp 4, the Haight-Ashbury of serious rockclimbing. He provides an informal sociological sketch of the place that is well worth reading.

Negatives? Nearly everyone reading this review has been hauled through the process of having a manuscript pummeled by a university press, three years of carping, proofing, editing, panicking, revising. Liebenow betrays the normal city-bred person’s fear of mountain lions and bears. It appears tiresomely on every third page. Could not someone among all those editors and readers have noticed, during those three years, that no one has been killed by a bear or mountain lion in the entire history of Yosemite National Park? (The last bear I saw there displayed three ear tags and a radio collar and wore the expression of a convict on the way to the exercise yard.) I am inclined to cut Liebenow a great deal of slack, especially since he should have gotten some help during those three long years. On page 175 the famous speech by Chief Seattle appears, the one about the rivers being his brothers, and so on. This press specializes in Native American history. Why was no one aware that that speech was written for a corny early-1970s movie? Seattle never said any such thing. We should expect better editing from a major university press.