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geometric shapes than in the wildflowers amid the ice such as yellow paintbrush, blue nootka lupine, or red dwarf firewood. Adams’s image Trailside, for example, a botanical composition of ferns taken outside Juneau in a rain forest, was a work of modern art in its utter simplicity and lack of ornamentation. In its own way, it prefigured the abstract expressionist paintings of Mark Rothko. From Adams’s perspective, kelp beds, besides being a crucial habitat for sea otters, became a work of minimalism to equal examples by Donald Judd or Carl Andre.

When the weather held up, Adams aimed for the Gustavus Forelands, the monument’s largest glacial outwash plain, located near the entrance of Glacier Bay. He had little success and felt frustrated. When the light wasn’t right, he read books and chatted with the fishermen who worked in Cross Sound. Agents of the National Park Service gladly ferried Adams about the park, enabling him to get close to the brittle surfaces of Margerie Glacier and Johns Hopkins Glacier. But Adams felt that his creative output from Glacier Bay was thin. There was no green fern light to create magic. Somewhat embarrassingly, all Adams had to show from the outings into the whipping fog was a handful of gray negatives. “The weather was so bad that Ansel got very few pictures,” Michael recalled. “It was sort of an abortive trip.”28

A professional nature photographer in the 1940s was, by definition, also a professional traveler. Every day Adams was being hustled off in planes or motorboats in pursuit of it. A nonstop roamer, he enjoyed this aspect of his vocation. While Carmel was his home, and tides were his timepiece, his spirit was footloose. Creatively, he was never at ease. Constantly worried about the light, in need of a strong assistant to help with the heavy lifting, and with a meteorologist’s understanding of shifting winds and tides, Adams, cameras in hand and dangling around his neck, was a distinctive figure in postwar America. His visual intelligence was probably comparable to that of an eagle or a hawk. But all his comings and goings led to occasional accidents. He had been lucky not to collide with a moose at Mount McKinley, and he had a serious mishap at Glacier Bay. One afternoon while unloading gear from a seaplane, Adams dropped the suitcase holding his shot film into a few feet of cold water. Upon opening the case he found that water had indeed seeped in and damaged his work. He felt ill. All he could do was wait to get to Seattle and send the damaged film to Pirkle Jones in San Francisco, a wizard whose forte was repairing damaged film. “I was naturally quite worried about them,” Adams recalled, “but thanks to Pirkle’s care only a few were irreparably damaged; my prized Mount McKinley negatives were perfect.”29

Adams wasn’t through with Glacier Bay National Monument. Determined to get a better series of photographs of the mountains, forests, glaciers, and seascapes in the famous Inside Passage, and with the Guggenheim Foundation continuing to pay his expenses, Adams returned to Juneau in the early spring of 1949. He wrapped himself up in a U.S. Army surplus parka to stay dry, but weariness and boredom consumed him. He found himself cursing the bad weather. Determined to shake the rainy-day blues, he visited Muir Inlet on the eastern arm of upper Glacier Bay, where Muir had indeed camped in 1879. Adams took note that the calving glacier had receded seventeen miles since then. Adams himself now practically glowed at seeing the glacier glisten in the effervescent mist, a kaleidoscope of light reflecting off the bluish-green ice. Chunks of ice collapsed into the frigid waters. To Adams, life seemed to thrive in the waters around Glacier Bay. A feeling of creative exuberance swept over him. Catchmen’s basins were filled with mussels and crabs and starfish. “This harsh land,” Adams wrote, “is blessed by the beautiful northern light and the constant, cleansing rain.”

This time Adams was working with the experts of the U.S. Geological Survey who were studying the territory’s more than 100,000