America’s national parks owe their existence to John Muir, a conservationist whose ideas about faith and the natural world resonate now more than ever A hundred years ago, in a hospital bed in Los Angeles, an old man died alone of pneumonia. Scattered across his bed were notes he had taken from one of his trips to Alaska at the end of the nineteenth century. Detailed scrawl, illustrated by sketches and laced with poetic descriptions, showed he had climbed many mountains solo, explored the perilous surface of glaciers to study in detail the workings of ice against rock, he had breathtaking adventures and met many tribes of Inuit. I like to think that as his life slipped away, he was once more breathing that ice-laden air and revelling in the sheer drama and beauty of that land. John