John Muir first visited Alaska in 1879, and he later made several trips there to test his beliefs on glacial activity. The largest tide-water glacier honours his memory properly. His labors were severely disrupted by his passionate leadership of the misguided fight to rescue his beloved Hetch-Hetchy Valley. As he carefully and thoroughly went through the large quantity of Alaska notes that had gathered under his hands for more than thirty years, illness also presented some obstacles. It is futile to conjecture how Muir would have ended the book if he had survived to finish it because his notes on the remaining portion of the expedition have not been located. The fact that his final work concludes with a description of the auroras, however, will make it impossible for anybody to read the description of the Northern Lights without experiencing a sense of artistic appropriateness. The meticulous care that John Muir put into his writing is evident on every page of his manuscripts. He was relentless in his search for the significance of a physiological fact, and because to his amazing physical stamina, he was generally able to track it down to its last hiding spot. Just a few months before he passed away, Mrs. Marion Randall Parsons helped him out with kindness.
John Muir, a Scottish-American naturalist, novelist, environmental philosophy, botanist, biologist, and glaciologist who lived from April 21, 1838, to December 24, 1914, was a leader in the fight to protect wild areas in the United States of America. He is also referred to as the "Father of the National Parks" and "John of the Mountains." In Dunbar, East Lothian, Scotland, there is a four-story stone home known as John Muir's Birthplace. His parents were Ann Gilrye and Daniel Muir. He was the third kid out of eight. Muir's family immigrated to the United States in 1849 and established a farm close to Portage, Wisconsin known as Fountain Lake Farm. When Muir was over 40 years old in 1878, his friends "pressured him to return to society." Louisa Strentzel, the daughter of a well-known physician and gardener, was introduced to him by Jeanne Carr not long after he returned to the Oakland region. At the age of 76, Muir passed away from pneumonia on December 24, 1914, at the California Hospital in Los Angeles. He had traveled to Daggett, California, to visit Helen Muir Funk, his daughter. Ross Hanna, his grandson, survived until 2014 before passing away at the age of 91, and his great-grandson also passed away in 2014 at the age of 91.
