Yosemite Falls - by Daniel Duane (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

From a cult-favorite nature writer, a memoir of climbing, California, and the double-sided coin of legacy and preservation.

In Daniel Duane's childhood, John Muir was apostle and prophet, the man who taught Californians to love nature. Duane's family worshipped in the Muir way by backpacking, skiing, and climbing. They read the scripture, too, from Muir's earnest essays to the memoirs of the charismatic geologist Clarence King to classic accounts of Indigenous California. Paradise, for Duane's family, was Yosemite National Park. For Duane, though, devotional study of Yosemite meant confrontation with its nuanced, violent--and sometimes absurd--history.

In Yosemite Falls, Duane tells the story of his family and the park, populated by the characters of his own life and of California past. His beloved outdoorsman father, who taught him to climb and cast a long shadow. His mother, his wife, and his daughters, who all share his passion for the outdoors. Ishi, who in 1911 was the last living member of the Yahi people, taken in as an object of study by UC Berkeley. And Muir himself, whose messy biography and Victorian worldview forced Duane into a painful apostasy about California's "great" men and their gospel of the wild. Yosemite Falls is a vital and exuberant correction to the canon, offering an idiosyncratic new history of wilderness in the Golden State, where white supremacy, cultural theft, and governmental overreach abound.

With wry humor and inimitable style, Duane has crafted a book that is both playful and moving, at once a memoir of life in the mountain west and a reckoning with the true legacies of his family's ecological heroes.

Review Quotes

"Yosemite Falls is the mountain book we've all been waiting for. It's the great, big, sad, and funny update to the John-Muir-Jack-Kerouac-Cheryl-Strayed epic of California life outdoors, the book everybody in my world is going to read and talk about. But it's also 100% Duane. Nobody else could tell a can't-put-it-down story that weaves together freaking out on El Cap with the question of whether his dad's best friend was an asshole, burning religious scripture on the Muir Trail with the possibility that the California genocides might have been Muir's own fault--plus Muir getting run out of Yosemite for sleeping with his boss's wife and the open question of whether Duane's daughters will ever recover from his own sketchy parenting. Duane was already the underground GOAT of Yosemite writers. Yosemite Falls makes it official. This book is Duane's masterpiece: serious as a heart-attack, full of love and rage and, like Dan himself, always ready to hug it out." --Jimmy Chin, mountaineer and director of Free Solo

Praise for Caught Inside:

"[Duane is] an ontologist of dudedom, Henry David Thoreau doing aerials on a fiberglass board." ―Will Blythe, Esquire

About the Author