On April 8, 1956, Gary Snyder began work on a long poem entitled Mountains and Rivers Without End. Initially inspired by East Asian landscape painting and his own experience within "a chaotic universe where everything is in place," Snyder's vision was further stimulated by Asian art and drama, Gaia history, Native American performance and storytelling, the practice of Zen Buddhism, and the varied landscapes of Japan, California, Alaska, Australia, China, and Taiwan.
         While a few individual sections of the poem have been published in literary magazines and seven poems in a chapbook, Snyder's ardent fans have waited patiently through the past forty years for the completion of Mountains and Rivers Without End. The entire work appears for the first time in this volume.
          Traveling beyond its origins in the Western tradition of Whitman, Pound, and Williams, Mountains and Rivers is an epic of geology, prehistory, and planetary mythologies. It is a poem about land and its processes, a book about wisdom, compassion, and myth, and a narrative work that is not quite like anything else. It will stand as a masterpiece of the long poem in American English.

From the flyleaf of the Counterpoint edition of Mountains and Rivers Without End.
Copyright © 1996 Counterpoint

Walking up and around the long ridge of Tamalpais, "Bay Mountain," circling and climbing—chanting—to show respect and to clarify the mind. Philip Whalen, Allen Ginsberg, and I learned this practice in Asia. So we opened a route around Tam. It takes a day.

STAGE ONE

Muir Woods: the bed of Redwood Creek just where the Dipsea trail crosses it. Even in the dryest season of this year some running water. Mountains make springs.

Prajñâpâramitâ-hridaya-sûtra
Dhâranî for Removing Disasters
Four Vows

Splash across the creek and head up the Dipsea Trail, the steep wooded slope and into meadows. Gold dry grass. Cows—a huge pissing, her ears out, looking around with large eyes and mottled nose. As we laugh. "—Excuse us for laughing at you." Hazy day, butterflies tan as grass that sit on silver-weathered fenceposts, a gang of crows. "I can smell fried chicken" Allen says—only the simmering California laurel leaves. The trail winds crossed and intertwining with a dirt jeep road.

TWO

Dhâranî for Removing Disasters
The Heat Mantra

A tiny chörten before this tree.

THREE

A ring of outcropped rocks. A natural little dolmen-circle right where the Dipsea crests on the ridge. Looking down a canyon to the ocean—not so far.

Dhâranî for Removing Disasters
Hari Om Namo Shiva

And on to Pan Toll, across the road, and up the Old Mine Trail. A doe and a fawn, silvery gray. More crows.

FOUR

Rock springs. A trickle even now—

The Sarasvatî Mantra
Dhâranî for Removing Disasters

FIVE

Om Shri Maitreya
Dhâranî for Removing Disasters

Collier spring—in a redwood grove—water trickling out a pipe.

Dhâranî of the Great Compassionate One

SEVEN

Inspiration Point.

Dhâranî for Removing Disasters
Mantra for Târâ

Looking down on Lagunitas. The gleam of water storage in the brushy hills. All that smog—and Mt. St. Helena faintly in the north. The houses of San Anselmo and San Rafael, once large estates…"Peacock Gap Country Club"—Rocky brush climb up the North Ridge Trail.

EIGHT

Summit of Mt. Tamalpais. A ring of rock pinnacles around the lookout.

Prajñâpâramitâ-hridaya-sûtra
Dhâranî for Removing Disasters
Dhâranî of the Great Compassionate One

Hari Krishna Mantra
Om Shri Maitreya
Hari Om Namo Shiva

Parking lot of Mountain Home. Cars whiz by, sun glare from the west.

Dhâranî for Removing Disasters
Gopala Mantra.

Then, across from the California Alpine Club, the Ocean View Trail goes down. Some yellow broom flowers still out. The long descending trail into shadowy giant redwood trees.

TEN

The bed of Redwood Creek again.

Prajñâpâramitâ-hridaya-sûtra
Dhâranî for Removing Disasters
Hari Om Namo Shiva
Hari Krishna Mantra
Four Vows

—standing in our little circle, blowing the conch, shaking the staff rings, right in the parking lot.

"The Circumambulation of Mt. Tamalpais" Copyright © 1996 by Gary Snyder. All rights reserved.
Photographs Copyright © 1996 by Rod Bauer. All rights reserved.

Notes about the author.

You are invited to send comments on the above work to the author.