John Muir
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50 free John Muir trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
John Muir is often called the Father of the National Parks, but the man behind the title is stranger and more fun than the nickname suggests. He was a farm-boy inventor, a factory hand, a long-distance walker and a mountaineer who took risks that still make readers wince, all before he became the best-known voice for wild places in America. This quiz gathers the fun facts people look for about John Muir and turns them into questions. It covers his strict childhood and his move to a new country, the accident that changed his life, his years in Yosemite and the far north, the friends and rivals he made, the campaigns he won and lost, and the trails, woods and coins that carry his name today. Every question comes with a short explanation, so the page works as a quick read for hikers, students, teachers and park visitors as well as a challenge for anyone who already knows the story. Start with the opening set and see how far you get.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Young inventor John Muir rigged his bed to do what at a set hour each morning?
Tip him onto his feet
Tip him onto his feet is what the bed did, and on dark winter mornings it lit a lamp as well. Muir called his wake-up contraption an early-rising machine.
Q 02What did John Muir design into the small cabin he built for himself in Yosemite Valley?
A stream flowing inside
A stream flowing inside was the whole idea: Muir led part of Yosemite Creek through a corner of the room so he could hear running water. He lived in the cabin for two years.
Q 03During a fierce winter windstorm in the Sierra, John Muir did what to feel the gale more closely?
Climbed a tall tree
Climbed a tall tree is right: Muir went up a 100-foot Douglas spruce and clung to its whipping top for hours. He compared himself to a bobolink on a reed.
Q 04Which US president camped with John Muir in Yosemite in 1903 and woke under a dusting of fresh snow?
Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt asked Muir to show him the real Yosemite, and the pair slipped away to sleep in the open near Glacier Point. Three years later Yosemite Valley passed to federal control.
Q 05A slipped tool in an Indianapolis wagon-wheel factory temporarily cost John Muir which of his senses?
Sight
Sight came back after six weeks in a darkened room, and Muir emerged a changed man. He quit the factory for good and resolved to spend his life studying wild plants.
Q 06John Muir spent his first summer in the Sierra herding which animals, later scorned by him as hoofed locusts?
Sheep
Sheep by the thousand stripped the high meadows bare, and that single season turned their keeper against them. Keeping livestock out of the high country became one of Muir's first causes.
Q 07Which words complete John Muir's famous 1873 line to his sister, 'The mountains are calling and I...'?
must go
The line ends with must go, in a letter to his sister Sarah dated 3 September 1873. It stayed private until a collection of Muir's letters appeared in 1924, ten years after his death.
Q 08The John Muir Way, a coast-to-coast walking route opened in 2014, crosses which country where Muir was born?
Scotland
Scotland was Muir's home until he was 11, and the 134-mile route ends at his birthplace in the seaside town of Dunbar. It starts on the west coast at Helensburgh.
Q 09John Muir appears on California's 2005 state quarter alongside Yosemite's Half Dome and which endangered bird?
A condor
A condor shares the coin with Muir and the granite dome he loved. He was also the first person California honored with a commemorative day of his own.
Q 10Before John Muir's glacier theory won out, California's state geologist insisted Yosemite Valley was created by what?
An earthquake
An earthquake that dropped the valley floor in one convulsion was the official view, and its author dismissed Muir as an amateur. When a real tremor shook Yosemite in 1872, Muir ran out of his cabin to welcome it.
Q 11Which valley in Yosemite National Park did John Muir fight in vain to save from being dammed and flooded?
Hetch Hetchy
Hetch Hetchy was lost when Congress approved the dam in 1913, about a year before Muir died. The fight is often described as the first major battle of the environmental movement.
Q 12The dam John Muir fought until 1913 was built to send mountain water to which growing city?
San Francisco
San Francisco began receiving the water in 1934, sent 167 miles across the state by aqueduct. That was twenty years after Muir's death.
Q 13When John Muir's family emigrated to America in 1849, they started a farm in which Midwestern state?
Wisconsin
Q 21The Sierra Club, co-founded by John Muir in 1892, was first proposed as which kind of club?
Alpine
Alpine was the word a Berkeley professor used when he pitched Muir a local club for mountain lovers. Muir was elected its leader a week after the first meeting and kept the post for 22 years.
Q 22Which first chief of the US Forest Service broke with John Muir in 1897 over commercial use of forest reserves?
Gifford Pinchot
Gifford Pinchot wanted forests managed for lasting use, while Muir wanted them left alone. Their quarrel split the movement into conservationists and preservationists.
Q 23In 1867 John Muir set out on foot from Kentucky and walked about a thousand miles to which state?
Florida
Wisconsin was still largely wild country around the Muirs' Fountain Lake Farm, where the 11-year-old first explored American lakes and meadows. The site is now a National Historic Landmark.
Q 14By age 11, John Muir's strict father had made him learn by heart most of which book?
The Bible
The Bible went in under threat of a whipping: Muir said he could recite the whole New Testament and most of the Old by heart and by sore flesh.
Q 15John Muir made seven trips between 1879 and 1899 to study the glaciers of which future US state?
Alaska
Alaska drew Muir back again and again to watch living ice at work, the force he believed had carved Yosemite. One of its great glaciers now carries his name.
Q 16John Muir's much-loved story Stickeen recounts a day on a glacier with what kind of companion?
A dog
A dog named Stickeen shared the 1880 outing, and the tale became a classic of its kind. Muir said it was the hardest thing he ever tried to write.
Q 17The John Muir Trail runs more than 200 miles from Yosemite Valley to the summit of which peak?
Mount Whitney
Mount Whitney, the highest point in the contiguous United States, marks the southern end. Work on the trail began in 1915, the year after Muir died, and finished in 1938.
Q 18Muir Woods National Monument, named for John Muir in 1908, protects old-growth groves of which tree?
Coast redwood
Coast redwood groves in the canyon were bought by William Kent to stop logging, then given to the nation. He insisted that the new monument carry Muir's name.
Q 19Which celebrated American essayist met John Muir in Yosemite in 1871 and offered him a teaching post at Harvard?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson spent a day with the young unknown and wanted him at Harvard. Muir refused to trade the mountains for a professorship, though he kept reading the older man's essays by firelight.
Q 20The 1890 law creating Yosemite National Park, which John Muir championed, was modeled on which earlier park?
Yellowstone
Yellowstone set the pattern, and Congress drew the boundaries almost as Muir had proposed in two magazine articles that year. Yosemite Valley itself stayed under state control until 1906.
Florida was the end of the road, at Cedar Key on the Gulf coast, where malaria nearly killed him. Muir had no fixed route beyond taking the wildest, leafiest, least trodden way he could find.
Q 24A fellow student's lesson beneath a black locust tree sent John Muir flying to the woods to study which science?
Botany
Botany hooked Muir the moment he learned that the towering locust and the humble garden pea are close relatives. He left university without a degree, yet knew enough to guide his later wanderings.
Q 25John Muir died of pneumonia on Christmas Eve 1914 in which city, far from the Sierra he loved?
Los Angeles
Los Angeles was where Muir's last trip ended: he had gone to the desert town of Daggett to visit family. He was 76 and had kept traveling almost to the end.
Q 26Camp Muir, a climbers' refuge honoring John Muir's 1888 ascent, sits high on which Washington volcano?
Mount Rainier
Mount Rainier's most-used high camp stands above 10,000 feet. Muir climbed the peak after years of ranch work had worn down his health, and the trip helped send him back to the wild.
Q 27Which milestone did John Muir reach only in 1903, more than fifty years after arriving in America?
US citizenship
US citizenship came when Muir was 65. By then he had already co-founded the Sierra Club and helped create Yosemite National Park.
Q 28John Muir spent the last years of the US Civil War collecting plants and working at a sawmill in which country?
Canada
Canada took Muir in from 1864, after his brother had gone north to avoid the draft. He worked at a rake factory in Ontario until fire destroyed it in 1866.
Q 29John Muir wrote that on leaving college without a degree he was simply transferring to the University of what?
The Wilderness
The Wilderness is the university Muir claimed in the closing line of his autobiography. He wrote that he said goodbye to his alma mater in tears.
Q 30Caught overnight by a blizzard near the summit of Mount Shasta, John Muir survived by doing what?
Lying in hot springs
Lying in hot springs near the top kept Muir alive until morning, thanks to the volcano's sulfur vents. He later turned the ordeal into a dramatic magazine article.