As I was walking that Ribbino Highway I saw above me endless Endless Skyway I saw below me in the Golden Valley.

This land was made for you and me. In 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt ditched his secret service detail to go camping in the woods of Yosemite with celebrated naturalist John Muir.

Through his writings, Muir taught the importance of experiencing and protecting

our natural world. That camping trip changed the face of conservation in the United States. Together, sleeping on the forest floor below the

Sequoias, they laid the foundation for the next century of federal land preservation.

On this episode of America's National Parks, Yosemite, John Muir, Teddy Roosevelt,

and a man who was along for the ride in their own words.

First here's Abigail Trebue

with John Muir's portrait of the land he loved the most. Of all the mountain ranges I have climbed, I like the Sierra Nevada the best,

though extremely rugged with its main features on the grandest scale and height and depth,

it is nevertheless easy of access and hospitable.

And its marvelous beauty displayed in striking and alluring forms

woos the admiring wanderer on and on, higher and higher, charmed and enchanted.

Benevolent, solemn, fateful, pervaded with divine light,

every landscape glows like a countenance hollowed in eternal repose,

and every one of its living creatures clad in flesh and leaves,

and every crystal of its rocks, whether on the surface shining in the sun, or buried miles deep in what we call darkness is

throbbing and pulsing with the heartbeats of God.

All the world lies warm in one heart, yet the Sierra seems to get more light than any other mountains.

The weather is mostly sunshine, embellished with magnificent storms and nearly everything

shines from base to summit. The rock streams, lakes, glaciers, iris' falls in the

forests of silver fur and silver pine.

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