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that nothing had changed much since Hetch Hetchy Valley was dammed in the 1920s. Developers in California still wanted concrete water reservoirs, open grazing, timber clear-cuts, and ski resorts. Ickes showed Adams’s book Sierra Nevada to congressmen and insisted that a roadless park was the “new way,” but he faced strenuous opposition from the Republican Party. The lengthy process of compromise that followed included a great to-do over the park’s name. Ickes was eventually forced to drop the name John Muir (California’s businessmen still considered Muir a rabble-rouser), and Republicans didn’t want the word wilderness on any piece of legislation.

Instead of emphasizing the fact that the Kings Canyon region was home to Sierra black bears, Ickes stressed the 200 Native American archaeological sites. On March 4, 1940, President Roosevelt signed legislation creating Kings Canyon National Park.9 “Because it was a roadless park, and because of his disability, Roosevelt would never be able to see Kings Canyon in person,” the historians Dayton Duncan and Ken Burns write in The National Parks. “Instead, he contented himself with following John Muir’s trail through the photographs of Ansel Adams.”10

Ickes now hired Adams to work for the Department of the Interior. Ickes paid him $22.22 a day to go all over the United States, visiting dozens of national parks and monuments, shooting images to bring back to Washington, D.C., for public display. Ickes hoped Adams’s photographs would be analogous to the WPA guidebooks. The bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese and the United States’ entry into World War II lent urgency to Adams’s project: his photos showed America’s treasured landscapes—landscapes surely worth fighting for. The forty-four-year-old Adams called his nature photography “emotional presentations” for the troops. Adams also taught soldiers at Fort Ord, California, photography and escorted troops around Yosemite Valley.

By 1945 Ansel Adams was almost a household name in America, the nation’s most respected photographer. Nobody could match his achievements. Adams helped found the journal Aperture, showcasing up-and-coming photographers and promoting the newest camera techniques and equipment to the general public. Yosemite would remain Adams’s special place, but a visit to Glacier National Park in 1941 (paid for by Ickes) set off a craving for Alaskan landscapes. Adams started looking for a way to experience the far north, and an opportunity arose in 1942 when the John Guggenheim Memorial Foundation offered him a fellowship grant to explore national parks with his celebrated lens. Seldom has a grant been so wisely allocated. Adams was convinced that in Alaska his ideal of the wilderness would evolve to new heights.

Adams didn’t travel light. Wherever he went, he took his eight-by-ten camera, lenses, filter sets, Graflex cameras, and three specially designed pods—so many accessories, in fact, that to list them all would fill a page.11 Adams, a consummate professional, was determined to capture the essence of every U.S. national park and of many national monuments. He looped through the Southwest to take photographs at Joshua Tree, Organ Pipe, and Saguaro. He had a new 1946 Pontiac station wagon, and he put a lot of tires and miles on it as he drove down to Big Bend National Park, where the Rio Grande flows like a lazy serpent.12 A few of those first-round photos of national parks—taken in Arizona, Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, and Texas—appeared in Fortune, accompanied by an article by Bernard De Voto. De Voto, through his essays in Harper’s Weekly, published during the Truman-Eisenhower years, did a good job of filling the void left by Marshall’s death and Ickes’s retirement. He became perhaps the best publicist for protecting America’s public lands against powerful stockmen. Secretary of the Interior Julius A. Krug—Ickes’s successor—in a rare burst of inspiration, appointed De Voto to the National Park Advisory Board. What struck De Voto about Adams’s pictures, he later revealed in The Western Paradox, was the absence of