The Sierra Club, founded in California, will be 130 years old on Saturday, May 28. It is one of the oldest environmental nonprofits but it is struggling with its history.

The Sierra Club was founded May 28, 1892, with John Muir as its first president. Its first order of business was to defeat a proposal to reduce the boundaries of Yosemite National Park.

Today the Sierra Club’s history is being recast. A note on the organization’s website says: “We are revising this section of our website, which presents the Sierra Club’s history in an insensitive and exclusionary way. We are committed to engaging more critically with our past and reckoning with the ways racism, sexism, and other systems of oppression have shaped our organization. Please check back soon for an updated page.”

The club that has 60 chapters nationwide (13 in California) and about 1.3 million members is reassessing its founder, the man known as the father of our national parks.

The Sierra Club issued a formal apology in July 2020 for racist remarks by Muir more than a century earlier.

Then-Executive Director Michael Brune said it was “time to take down some of our own monuments” as statues of Confederate officers and colonists came down across the U.S. in a reckoning with the nation’s racist history.

“He made derogatory comments about Black people and Indigenous peoples that drew on deeply harmful racist stereotypes, though his views evolved later in his life,” Brune wrote on the group’s website. “As the most iconic figure in Sierra Club history, Muir’s words and actions carry an especially heavy weight. They continue to hurt and alienate Indigenous people and people of color.”

Muir was good friends with the founder of the American Eugenics Society and many early members of the Sierra Club were eugenicists as well, believing the genetic composition of humans could be improved through controlled reproduction of different races and classes of people.

Sierra Club, Muir years

1900s: The club begins an organized outings program, with annual trips to the Sierra Nevada. President Theodore Roosevelt visits Yosemite with Muir and, two years later, the club’s campaign to return management of Yosemite Valley to the federal government from the state of California succeeds.

1910s: The National Park Service is created, with Stephen Mather, a Sierra Club member, as its first director. The California Legislature passes a law to support construction of the John Muir Trail in the Sierra Nevada.

The Sierra Club has been given four out of four stars by Charity Navigator, which scrutinizes nonprofits. In 2021 the club received a score of 95.87 out of 100 possible points.

86.1 cents of every dollar given to the Sierra Club goes to the implementation of conservation programs.

The people’s trail?

There is a movement to rename the John Muir Trail. In 2018, seven Indigenous women hiked across the Sierra Nevada in an act of cultural reclamation. The route was used by tribes in the Sierra for centuries before Muir discovered it, and it is known as the Nüümü Poyo, or the People’s Trail.

From north to south, the trail starts in Happy Isles in Yosemite Valley and winds to Mount Whitney, the tallest mountain in the contiguous U.S. The 221-mile trail ends at the Whitney Portal near Lone Pine. Most of the trail lies above 8,000 feet in designated wilderness. It took 46 years to complete construction, starting in 1938.

A lot to change

Muir was born in Scotland on April 21, 1838. He entered Yosemite Valley for the first time in 1868, and his writings about the area encouraged support for preservation of land in California and America.

Muir published six collections of writing while alive (four more were published posthumously).

Muir was married, had two daughters and ran an orchard in Martinez, where his mansion is maintained by the Park Service.

At least one high school, 21 elementary schools, six middle schools and one college are named after him, as well as a glacier, a mountain, a forest, a beach, a cabin, an inlet, a highway, a library, a motel, a medical center and a minor planet.

In 1914, Muir died in a Los Angeles hospital on Christmas Eve.

The profile of Muir — with long beard, brimmed hat and walking stick, gazing at Yosemite’s Half Dome — was stamped on the 2005 California quarter when the U.S. Mint was producing a commemorative coin for every state.

If you are thinking of hiking the trail, you are not alone and will need to plan in advance. Wilderness permits in the Sierra Nevada are under a quota system that prevents crowding on the trail and protects the environment. John Muir Trail permits go quickly. Yosemite wilderness permit reservations are available 24 weeks (168 days) in advance. Read the John Muir Trail permit page on the National Park Service’s Yosemite website.

Sources: The Associated Press, The Sierra Club, Pacific Crest Trail Association, National Park Service