John Muir – a life, but also a hike. Muir is 200 miles of high-level granite and pine, but also the inventor of a clockwork self-awakening bed and the American national park system. Muir is East Lothian's Man of the Millennium – this despite the fact that he left Scotland for ever at the age of eleven – and one of the best long paths in the world.

Award-winning outdoor writer Ronald Turnbull follows John Muir from his birthplace in Dunbar to the Californian trail that bears his name. A perceptive, humorous companion over 210 miles of the Sierra Nevada (and 45 miles of East Lothian coast), Turnbull shares remote camps with some eccentric trail types, pokes fun at Thoreau and explores the paradoxes inherent in the preservation of wilderness. Most of all, he reflects on the life and ideas of John Muir himself: pioneering conservationist, writer and walker, inspired visionary and tiresome tree-hugger - the exiled Scot who invented the American outdoors.