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By Root 2919 0

officer, having suffered wind, rain, and dizzyingly high altitudes for decades, called the plane the Flying Coffin. After a shaky takeoff, Ansel and Michael’s nerves stabilized. They soon enjoyed flying low over Alaska’s coastal waters, landing in bays where their pilot inspected commercial fishing boats, ensuring that the crews hadn’t exceeded their catch limits. A lover of gadgetry, Adams enjoyed studying the plane’s instrument panels; the cockpits of planes used in the coastal areas of Alaska were quite different from those operating in the interior and the Arctic. From this bird’s-eye view, Adams took a series of distant color shots of “Mount Saint Elias floating in the clouds.” These “personal” photos remained, as late as 2010, in the personal collection of Michael Adams, unseen by the general public.

In his correspondence Adams was boyishly enthusiastic about flying over the Brady Icefield, Mount Fairweather, and Icy Strait. All high peaks were mysterious to Adams. Often, Adams wore a Brooks Brothers sports jacket, a white shirt, and a plain tie; he didn’t like people who turned native. He was balding, and his broad forehead was perhaps his most recognizable feature. Adams’s well-trimmed beard suggested a tweedy college professor. Alaskans soon learned that the always alert Adams was a master at interpreting the moods of their landscape; he would interrupt conversations to point out when a cloud drooped or the sun turned fierce. The Earth had been created long ago—in the flash of a starburst, he thought—and his calling was to turn the creator’s magic flashes into framable high art. The whole labyrinth of human consciousness could be found, Adams believed, in a single blade of grass or a fallen rock. “The quality of place, the reaction to immediate contact with earth and glowing things that have a frugal relationship with mountains and sky,” he wrote, “is essential to the integrity of our existence on this planet.”16

In Juneau and Fairbanks, there would be many stories of Adams flying around Alaska in the Grumman Goose and landing on water. The six- to eight-passenger plane regulary landed on lakes and bays so that Adams could compose quick pictures. He ordered his pilots to swoop low toward the ground to gain a better angle on sunsets and wildfires. One afternoon, Adams’s plane nearly crashed when the right-hand landing gear malfunctioned. But as Adams had predicted, the death-defying maneuver helped him find the perfect pink-and-purple rose light, a light that infused the blue-green-gray-white landscape with grace, making for memorable photos. “We crisscrossed the Coast Range many times, exploring deep valleys, lakes, passes, and peaks,” Adams wrote in An Autobiography. “The shadows lengthened and the golden light on the snowy mountains intensified.”17

A great photographer like Adams will spend weeks, even months, in search of the perfect picture. For that reason, Mount McKinley was a formidable challenge. It seemed arrogant in its immensity, stubbornly denying photographers access to its inner secrets. Perpetually snowcapped, the 20,000-foot, wind-bitten peak simply defied the power of Adams’s thirty-five millimeter Contax lens. Even if a photographer had perfect conditions of light, shadow, and wind, it was difficult to capture such bulk, even with a wide-angle lens. Patience was necessary if the goal was to create the definitive photo of America’s tallest peak. Many photographers, unaccustomed to the thin air at high altitudes, suffered dizzy spells near this peak. Adams, however, took to Mount McKinley, climbing it and plotting his strategy. Since McKinley was three times higher than Yosemite’s Half Dome, he realized that the task would be three times as difficult.18

Tourists coming to Mount McKinley National Park during the summer of 1947 were often unsure how to approach the steep summit. Somehow simply driving along the park’s road was unfulfilling. Thus a booming business began; companies offered hourlong air trips around the peak. The tourists were thrilled to experience McKinley from above; and motion