Since the 1800s, the city of San Francisco had been hoping to build a reservoir in Yosemite National Park. Muir and Johnson fought tirelessly against damming Hetch Hetchy Valley.

Muir wrote, “Yosemite is so wonderful that we are apt to regard it as an exceptional creation, the only valley of its kind in the world; but Nature is not so poor as to have only one of anything. One of these, the Hetch Hetchy Valley, is in the Yosemite National Park.”

Muir and unidentified person on the Hetch Hetchy Valley floor around 1909.