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glaciers. For days Adams traveled with them in planes and helicopters, learning everything possible about glacial systems, from why ice flowed down the valley to the process of firnification. It was impossible for an intelligent man like Adams to inspect a glacier’s terminus and not be overwhelmed by its titanic force. A number of the seventeen tidewater glaciers Adams visited were calving, dropping huge hunks of ice into the waterways with thunderous splashes. Adams found it mind-boggling that the Stikine Icefield blanketed more than 2,900 square miles along the Coastal Mountains that defined the U.S.-Canadian border. “In Alaska,” Adams wrote, “I felt the full force of vast space and wilderness.”30

The question facing Adams at Glacier Bay was exactly what constituted the essence of the national park. How could he get one perfect shot, a representative glimpse into such a spread-out, diverse ecosystem with thousands of varied natural features? Instead of aiming his camera at Muir Glacier, Adams took his best photographs by shooting a chunk of ice jutting out of a bay like a colossal piece of crystal. He titled the composition Grounded Iceberg; it’s included in the oversize hardback edition of An Autobiography. This is not one of Adams’s great landscape photographs, but it aptly captures the sensation of a water world, of the isolation, frozenness, and summer thaws that are characteristic of Glacier Bay National Monument.

That summer, Adams once again fell in love with Alaska’s steep mountains and intricate waterways. A connoisseur of rain, because it often scrubbed the sky, he now complained it “RAINS AND RAINS AND RAINS AHHHHHH PLOP!”31 Overall, however, his letters to friends in the Lower Forty-Eight reveal a boisterous enthusiasm for Glacier Bay that almost equals his passion for Yosemite. For example, here is his letter of June 25, 1949, to his friends Beaumont and Nancy Newhall:

Dear B & N,

WHAT A FLIGHT TODAY! Was in Grumman Amphibian which was dropping loads of supplies to advance base of Juneau Ice Field Expedition. . . .

We crossed and re-crossed 600 square miles of glaciers and ice fields, and encircled the most incredible crags and spires I ever imagined. Bearclaw Peak rises sheer 5000 feet above the ice. We flew around it about 1000 feet distant!

Pictures will help to describe it! The rear door was open to permit dumping loads by parachute. I am full of fresh air, spray on the take-off, noise, but simply unbelievable scenery.

I am afraid Alaska is the Place for me! I am NUTS about it.

Best to you and all our friends, Ansel32

When Adams’s retrospective opened at San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art in June 1949, his Alaskan photographs generated considerable excitement. (He himself was in Alaska and missed the opening.) Mount McKinley and Wonder Lake was a standout. Everybody, it seemed, agreed that the shots of McKinley had a rare originality: minimalism meeting romanticism in the forlorn Alaskan Range. Like Muir before him, Adams used his photographs to encourage tourists to visit Alaska with their own cameras in hand. He wanted everyone to experience the national parks. In Alaska many ridges remained unclimbed. A new consultant for the Polaroid Corporation, Adams urged amateurs, the core of the conservation movement, to try to capture Mount McKinley and Glacier Bay in their own photographs. The rewards of Alaska, he would tell students at the Ansel Adams Yosemite Workshop (an intense, short photography program held annually in California’s premier national park beginning in 1955), were life-changing. As the new oracle for the Sierra Club and a true disciple of Muir, Adams knew that only seeing Alaska would lead to saving the last frontier. Echoing Horace Greeley’s “Go west, young man,” Adams said to the postwar generation, “Go to Alaska, folks, and bring a camera.”33

III

Two female pilots—Virginia “Ginny” Hill and Celia Hunter—followed Adams’s advice. Because they became lifelong friends during World War II, when they served in the Women Air Force Service Pilots (WASP) corps, Hill and Hunter are