For most of the last sixteen years I lived twelve miles from the divide separating my terminal-basin watershed from that of the Pacific Ocean. I am a mountaineer, striving to live like John Muir did. The high peaks that he climbed at the top of Yosemite's watershed sheltering the living glaciers so intently studied by him were the same ones that I climbed at the top of mine.
I lived so close to that divide that I climbed many of those peaks from my home without the aid of fossil fuel--once I