Guardians of the Valley

John Muir and the Friendship That Saved Yosemite

In June of 1889 in San Francisco, John Muir—iconic environmentalist, writer, and outdoorsman—meets face-to-face for the first time with his longtime editor Robert Underwood Johnson. The pair, opposites in many ways, venture to Yosemite Valley, the magnificent site where 20 years earlier, Muir experienced a spiritual awakening that reset the course of his life.

But now they discover that predatory mining, tourism, and logging industries have ravaged “the grandest of all the special temples of Nature.” While Muir is consumed by grief, Johnson, a feisty editor of the nation’s most prestigious magazine, decides that he and Muir must fight back. The pact they form leads to the creation of Yosemite National Park and the Sierra Club and launches an epic battle over the sanctity of wilderness that captivates the nation.

Guardians of the Valley is a dramatic and uplifting story of friendship, the written word, and the transformative power of nature. It is a timely and powerful “origin story” of the American environmental movement as the toweringly complex climate challenges we face today become increasingly urgent.

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“There have been many books written about John Muir, but no one has so keenly identified the transformational nature of the faithful friendship between Muir and Robert Underwood Johnson. The charming, wily, and eloquent Johnson was an Eastern aesthete and Muir a rough-hewn naturalist, daring outdoorsman, fierce conservationist, a man of science, but also a poet and philosopher, who with Johnson’s impassioned guidance became a crusading political activist. Their unlikely friendship was forged in the maelstrom of the Gilded Age and in two bitter and influential battles over places both men considered hallowed—Yosemite, a battle they won, and the remote Hetch Hetchy valley, one they lost after a long, ugly war waged in the pages of newspapers and magazines and in halls of power in San Francisco and Washington. King has written a stirring tribute to the power of an alliance that transformed environmentalism in the U.S., a psalm to the radiant beauty of Yosemite, and an homage to John Muir, whom, as King assiduously sands away the polish of legend, emerges as a visionary, a mystic, and a reluctant but surprisingly accomplished political brawler dedicated to preserving the ‘temples of Nature’ for all Americans to cherish.”

—James Campbell, author of The Final Frontiersman and Braving It
"Guardians of the Valley is propulsive, revelatory, and immensely readable. Summoning new research and fresh insights into the extraordinary character of John Muir, Dean King has written an absorbing paean to a deep friendship that rescued one of the planet’s most magical landscapes from the jaws of Mammon."

—Hampton Sides, New York Times bestselling author of Blood and Thunder and In the Kingdom of Ice
“Just when I thought we had heard all we could read and hear about the miraculous John Muir, this wonderful book on Muir's lifelong battle to save wild lands came into my hands. Deeply thoughtful, precisely researched, it is testimony to our ongoing obligation to protect the natural world. Muir is our inspiration and our teacher.”

—Gretel Ehrlich, author of The Solace of Open Spaces and John Muir: Nature’s Visionary
“Guardians of the Valley is both timely and timeless, a sweeping narrative that’s also a deeply personal story. Its hero is John Muir, the great sage and protector of the natural world. Its theme is urgent: Without the wild things, we’re lost. With a mastery of small details that accrue into grand vistas, Dean King summons the majesty of the Yosemite Valley and the souls who recognized it. King has written an epic.”

—Susan Casey, bestselling author of The Wave and The Devil’s Teeth
“Guardians of the Valley propels Dean King to the first rank of writers on nature, letting us discover as if for the first time the beauty and majesty of Yosemite. And in his equally enthralling parallel story of John Muir’s partnership with editor and power broker Robert Underwood Johnson, King demonstrates how passion and politics, in support of noble causes, can unite rather than divide a nation. In that sense, this extraordinary book is more than great history. It just might be a blueprint for our own times.”

—Charles Slack, author of Liberty's First Crisis
“Read Guardians of the Valley and get swept up in the rousing and inspiring story of John Muir. In these challenging times, this riveting book reminds us of the importance of life beyond the human, and gives us a template for the climate fight ahead in the marriage of Muir's passion and Robert Johnson's political savvy. It also puts the lie to the recent clumsy attempts to cancel Muir, who, while flawed like all of us, lived a life filled with courage, passion, humor, and love. A fascinating chronicle of the man who changed the way we think about nature.”

—David Gessner, author of All the Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West
“With a poet’s eye for vivid imagery and a novelist’s grasp of complex characters, Dean King masterfully spins a magical story of a friendship for the ages, one that helped protect one of America’s greatest natural treasures—the Valley of Yosemite—and inspired the modern-day environmental movement. Like the rushing waters and towering trees that spoke so deeply to John Muir, King writes with a power and clarity that crackles like a campfire where the stories never grow old.”

—Chip Jones, author of The Organ Thieves
“In Guardians of the Valley Dean King chooses Robert Underwood Johnson as the perfect cornerstone to trace John Muir’s passion to preserve natural spaces. Much like Muir found paths among the giant sequoias, King found a path among these late nineteenth-century literary giants’ archives to trace their relationship and the early American conservation movement. King starts with their historic campfire in 1889 that prompted the preservation of Yosemite and the birth of the Sierra Club and concludes with the damming of Hetch Hetchy. He tells the story so well that the reader may think that this time the valley will be preserved.”

—Mike Wurtz, Head of the University of the Pacific Special Collections and the John Muir Papers and editor of John Muir’s Grand Yosemite: Musings & Sketches
“I immensely enjoyed this deeply personal, behind-the-scenes dive into John Muir's love affair with Yosemite, and his desperate mission to save it at all costs.”

—Scott Stillman, author of Wilderness, The Gateway to the Soul
“In Guardians of the Valley, Dean King has forged a flaming tribute to the perhaps greatest knight of American conservation, and to the extraordinary landscape that was his paramount source of inspiration.”

—Kevin Fedarko, author of The Emerald Mile
“An important, rip-roaring story, thoroughly researched and beautifully written, a vivid presentation of the key battles at the dawn of nature conservation in the United States. Muir, Johnson, Emerson, Pinchot, Roosevelt—all are alive in new ways on the pages of Guardians of the Valley. Dean King once again proves himself a powerful storyteller, more than equal to this timely tale of adventure, discovery, enlightenment, and John Muir’s iron will to protect some of North America's most important places.”

—James A. McLaughlin, author of Panther Gap and Bearskin: A Novel