Between 1869 and 1875, Munger made other trips around the West, painting landscapes—especially volcanic mountains—in central and southern California, Oregon, and Washington. With Albert Bierstadt, he made a trip in November 1872 to paint Donner Pass, named after the famously ill-fated Donner Party. In this phase of his career, he made San Francisco his home base, and he became a recognized figure in the Bay Area art world and part of the cultural circle centered on Bret Harte's Overland Monthly. His work began to circulate in print and in exhibitions, and some of his paintings were even used as study aids for geology students at Yale University. Many of the locales he painted are now icons of American geography: Yosemite's El Capitan, San Francisco's Golden Gate, California's giant sequoias, Mount Shasta, Mount Rainier, Mount Hood, the Great Salt Lake, the Blue Ridge Mountains, Niagara Falls. For their expansive grandeur, Munger's paintings were frequently compared to those of Bierstadt and Thomas Moran, but his work differs from theirs in its greater attention to scientifically observed detail.