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noted five days later, now in a deep funk. "This uselessness probably a result of so much gadding about & so many late hours after that very severe western trip. Anyway, am disgusted with myself most thoroughly."
    Back in New York city, Pinchot hung a shingle outside an office on Fourth Avenue and Twenty-second Street: CONSULTING FORESTER. He may have been the nation's
only
forester. He had decided to create his own job. His reputation grew quickly, aided by his father's contacts. In the closing days of the nineteenth century,
when American cities decided to build a park they went to Frederick Law Olmsted or his two sons. And when the subject was trees, Gifford Pinchot was the expert. But Pinchot was not content to be a consulting caretaker. His free time was spent in the wild, where his dreams took flight.
    It was on a hike in the Adirondacks in the fall of 1892 that Pinchot first met the most famous naturalist in America—John Muir, the wiry, engaging Scot with a Santa Claus beard and liquid blue eyes, full of spring. What Buffalo Bill meant for cowboy shows, John Muir was for serious lovers of the outdoors: a celebrity whose picture could evoke a man of action.
    Muir was one of eight children, who moved as a boy with his family to Wisconsin. There, he worked a farm; the knuckle-scuffing task of turning hard midwestern ground gave Muir an affinity with beasts of burden, he said later, helping him empathize with all living things. His early life showed no mark of greatness or ambition. He studied botany at the University of Wisconsin for a time, then kicked around the country for the better part of a decade, from factories in the flatlands to swamps in Florida. At age thirty, suffering from malaria, he sought the sunshine of California. That same year, 1868, he first saw Yosemite—its three-thousand-foot-high granite flanks, its soft light, its symphony of waterfalls. He stayed in the area for the next six years, working odd jobs, mostly as a shepherd. He developed his views on the land by observing, taking copious notes on the active geology of his adopted state, and by submission. He could write in clear, often witty, usually passionate prose, and his byline soon became one of the nation's best known. By marrying, in his forties, into a family of means northeast of San Francisco, he found himself with a Victorian home on a vineyard and orchard, and the financial comfort that allowed him to roam. And roam he did — kayaking waters choked with icebergs, walking uncharted ground in Alaska, summiting glacier-draped volcanoes in the Pacific Northwest, hiking in the Adirondacks and all over his beloved Sierra.
    A few days after meeting Muir in upstate New York, young Pinchot sent the naturalist a gift: a large hunting knife. Muir had no use for it — he foraged, yes, on many of his trips in the wild, but never took so much as a fish hook—to Pinchot's astonishment. Muir said all he needed was to "throw some tea and bread in an old sack and jump over the back fence." He was Huck Finn with shoes and a notebook. A few months later, at a dinner party at Pinchot's parents' home in Gramercy Park, they found they were kindred souls. "I took to him at once," Pinchot wrote. Muir became a friend and mentor, starting when Pinchot was twenty-seven, and Muir was nearly twice his age.
    "You are choosing the right way into the woods," Muir wrote him not long after the dinner party, where Pinchot had told him about his solo excursions outdoors. Others considered it strange for a man of Pinchot's standing to take monastic trips to the wilderness. Not Muir. "Happy man," he wrote his acolyte. "You will never regret a single day spent thus." Muir liked this odd patrician in part because he was such an eager follower—at first. In Pinchot, he saw someone "who could relish, not run from a rainstorm," as he wrote. Just like himself.
    Of course, there was calculation and some cunning on both sides. Pinchot's family wanted