In the summer of 1963, Fred Squire and Irvin Pearce, two otherwise regular teenagers from Downey, California, took to the Sierra Nevada mountains and walked the 220 mile length of the John Muir Trail. Up to that point relatively inexperienced in serious hiking and camping, it became a defining youthful adventure for each of them.

This is Irvin Pearce's personal travel journal, written night-by-night while in the mountains, and only now making it to print, 61 years later along with some of the key photographs taken along the trail. More than a factual account of places and landforms, this is largely a young man's immediate reflections, at times almost verging on manifesto, on the spiritual and practical rewards of time spent in the mountain wilderness and of nature's transformative effects on the city dweller.