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Gifford to connect with the influential Muir, a man whose company was sought by everyone from Ralph Waldo Emerson to New York Police Commissioner Teddy Roosevelt. Muir, who had just started the Sierra Club in 1892 as a voice for the California range, could always use the Pinchot money and perhaps this bright young forester to further the cause. Together with a few other men who were starting to talk of ways to protect the land, they formed a conservation caucus that could barely fill a Union Pacific caboose. Fellow travelers included Olmsted, who was one of the first to insist that it was America's duty to put aside "great public grounds for the free enjoyment of people"; a German-American forester, Bernhard Fernow, who headed the government's first division of forestry even though he had no land under his jurisdiction;
and the Boston botanist Charles Sargent. Small as the group was, their ideas were contagious, and well placed.
    On several trips in the West, Muir and Pinchot bonded under the open sky. They spent nights along the rim of the Grand Canyon, slogged up snow-coated peaks in the Northwest, tramped through the Bitterroots in Montana, sometimes moving at a clip of twenty miles a day. Pinchot's eccentricities were becoming more pronounced, even to the quirky Muir, who liked to lash himself to a tree to better understand the feeling of wind in a forest. During a rainy trek to Crater Lake in Oregon, a hollowed-out caldera high in the Cascade Mountains, Muir noted, "All slept in tent except Pinch ot."
    Pinchot and Muir did more than share hiking trips, of course. In 1896, they toured the West as part of the National Forest Commission, trying to help President Grover Cleveland decide what to do with big parts of Montana, Idaho, Washington, Oregon, Colorado, California, Wyoming, and Arizona Territory. Muir was an observer, Pinchot a leading voice of the commission, having already established himself as a pioneer voice for public forestry. They crossed the Bitterroot Mountains and thrashed through the deepest woods of Idaho, in the Clearwater River country, perhaps the wildest part of the contiguous United States — certainly the most inaccessible. In Oregon they toured the narrow green walls carved by the raging Rogue River and visited a nearby valley, the Umpqua, thick with salmon, steelhead, and coastal elk. Along the way, they spoke with hunters, homesteaders, and assorted wanderers. They ran into railroad men plotting new routes through the wild and speculators scouting for timber. Pinchot broke off and went by himself for a time, as usual most comfortable when alone. Curious. Where did he go at night? Later, Pinchot rejoined the commission when they got to the Grand Canyon.
    Muir and Pinchot were supposed to spend the evening at a hotel with other commission members, but they peeled away, pitching camp at the rim of the rainbow-colored gap in the earth—"the
greatest sight this world has to offer," as Pinchot called it. That night, he felt "awestruck and silent." Not so with the gabby Muir, who often conversed with flowers. He talked until midnight without interruption, his blue eyes reflecting the fire's glare, telling stories and filling Pinchot with his wilderness philosophy. More than anything he tried to get Pinchot to let down his guard, to put aside his formal training for a moment, to allow nature to get inside him. "We all travel the Milky Way together, trees and men," Muir had said. Before dozing off, Pinchot caught a tarantula. Muir would not let him kill it. "He said it had as much right to be there as we did."
    After returning to the East, the forest commission recommended that two national parks be created, Mount Rainier and Grand Canyon, and told President Cleveland he should establish a number of forest reserves for other lands they had seen. Muir had envisioned such protection for years, but the idea was heretical to Congress and the biggest landowners of the day, the natural resource