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permanence, silent and untouched—it is in fact a place where no one has ever dwelled in the winter months. Clouds shift rapidly around the summit; looking up at McKinley for too long can actually induce motion sickness. Michael also remembered the glare of the moon, and the colors swirling at dawn and dusk. From their ridge, they patiently waited for it—the flashing moment when, as the novelist Jack Kerouac declared, everything becomes valiantly understood. All around them was rolling tundra; and on Wonder Lake the ripples reflected and distorted light. It was hard to tell whether the light was falling or rising. “We both knew the moment,” Michael Adams recalled. “It was really something special. We had been to a lot of national parks, seen a lot of sights, but this was beyond amazing.”22

Judging art can be a matter of personal taste. Nobody has a monopoly on opinion. But it is safe to say that in Alaska Adams produced one of the greatest modern landscape photographs. In Mount McKinley and Wonder Lake, shot at 1:30 A.M. in July 1947, with an ethereal light on the lake, Adams managed to make the summit, the tallest mountain in North America, seem an auxiliary to the Denali wilderness that surrounds it. The contrast in the photo between peak and lake is sharp. The tonal effect is that mountain and sky are both subservient to the lake.

In the 1930s, Adams had perfected his “zone system,” a pragmatic method of achieving high vision by “controlling exposure, development, and printing, incisively translating detail scale, texture, and tone into the final image.”23 This process became his preoccupation. Put in layman’s terms, Adams had professionalized the art of capturing the changing nature of light and how it sweeps over a landscape. “The zone system is designed to eliminate guesswork,” Robert Hirsch explained in Seizing the Light: A History of Photography, “and give photographers repeatable control over their materials so that the outcome can be predicted (that is, previsualized).”24

Years after taking Mount McKinley and Wonder Lake, Adams explained his process in Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs. For aspiring nature photographers, for whom natural light is everything, the book remains a paragon of the art form. In it, Adams revealed how he debated whether to use a red 25-A filter but ended up going with a deep yellow 15, which served to suppress foreground shadows. In total, Adams shot three fine eight-by-ten images of Denali. Half an hour later, at 2:00 A.M., clouds had enveloped the peak and the light no longer radiated so expressively off Wonder Lake.25 Night at last fell over the summit. There would be other impressive compositions by Adams in the coming years—Moon and Half Dome (1960) and Rock and Surf (1951) are often cited—but none ever matched the haunting presence of his 1947 Alaskan masterpiece.26

Clearly, Adams represented an ideal blend of empathy with the outdoors, artistic visualization, mathematical calculation, intense patience, wizardry with a camera, and proficiency in the darkroom. He was a master of nonanimal nature. In Alaska, having hauled his equipment up a steep incline with only his son to help him, he was determined to succeed. Undeterred by the intermittent downpours, he captured the frozen splendor of McKinley at an instant in summer. He had waited for the miraculous moment, with all the elements aligned just right, and clicked. It was a matter of mathematics and heart. Somehow he had captured both the “spectacular” and “quiet still life” of Mount McKinley.27

II

From Mount McKinley National Park, Adams and his son headed to Fairbanks and had a plentiful meal. Then they boarded an airplane headed to Juneau and went on to capture the natural essence of Glacier Bay National Monument. Unlike McKinley, where any photographer knew what to aim at, Glacier Bay didn’t have a centerpiece. As a warm-up exercise Adams took minimalist still-life shots: a blade of grass, a veiny leaf, smooth rock faces—the elements of nature at Glacier Bay. Working in black and white, Adams was more interested in