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By Root 3149 0

was twenty-nine degrees Fahrenheit. Two weeks later the thermometer rose above eighty degrees. Along the glacially formed pothole lakes in the valley floor, every hour could bring a contrast. Olaus had brought a motion picture camera, which he aimed at caribou; it would be helpful for The Wilderness Society’s presentations at college campuses. Much of the scenery in the Sheenjek valley was reminiscent of A. B. Guthrie Jr.’s novel The Big Sky. But for long stretches the Murie party hiked over soggy muskeg as if doing penance for being biophilic; nothing was easy in the Arctic. Mardy decided that Sheenjek should mean “Land of Contrasts” (rather than “Dog Salmon,” its actual translation). On some days the Muries trapped mice to study and made borings in spruce trees to measure growth rates. One morning a grizzly visited the camp, and the mosquitoes followed. But overall, the “sample adventure” was working out idyllically.

Getting politicians in Washington, D.C.—or anybody—to care about Arctic Alaska in 1956 wasn’t easy. But the Murie expedition had a stroke of luck when William O. Douglas confirmed that he would join the expedition on June 29, along with his wife, Mercedes Hester Davidson. (Their addition made the expedition a party of seven.) Olaus had hiked along the C&O Canal—the 180-mile waterway trail from Washington, D.C., to Cumberland, Maryland—with Douglas, amazed by Douglas’s knowledge of birds, his astounding stamina, and his conservationist convictions. Douglas had fought to save the old towpath canal as a refurbished National Historic Park instead of allowing a concrete highway or a dam at River Bend just above Goat Falls, which would have flooded a section of the trail. Residents of Washington, D.C., have been grateful for his advocacy of the C&O Canal ever since. Douglas, an expert on land policy issues, continually thought of ways to protect the shrinking American wilderness from industrial ruin. As Douglas prepared for the trip to the Brooks Range, he was mulling over how best to draft a Wilderness Bill of Rights. “To Douglas,” the legal scholar William H. Rodgers Jr. explained, “those who canoe or hike or backpack or ride horses or climb mountains deserve protection no less than that extended to religious minorities.”6

Olaus knew that Douglas, who had hiked in the Cascades and the Olympics, disdained being pampered on the trail. The primitive conditions on the expedition—no pavement, no roads of any kind—would appeal to his desire to escape from the nation’s congested capital during the humid summer months. The unanswered question was whether the justice’s wife (his third) would be able to tolerate the backcountry conditions. Friends of Douglas had a theory that if a wife couldn’t handle his arduous campouts in the Pacific Northwest, then he’d dump her.7 “Trim, petite, blond, every hair in place, chic gray flannel suit, nylon hose, brown calf loafers,” Mardy wrote, describing Mrs. Douglas. “But I needn’t have worried! The first thing she said to me was ‘I’ve got my blue jeans and rubber pacs just like you said, as soon as I can get into our duffel.’ ”8

For too long, William O. Douglas’s judicial brilliance, intense manner, poetic demeanor, outdoors heartiness, uncluttered mind, environmental prescience, and landmark legal decisions have been neglected by historians. Because Douglas had a rather unconventional personal life, including numerous wives and numerous affairs with Supreme Court interns, gossip has often prevailed. But Douglas represented much that was good, true, and durable in America. Never did he fritter a day away with nothing accomplished. Hikes, to Douglas, were a productive time for thinking. During the cold war, nobody else fought to protect the Bill of Rights with the same ardor as Douglas. During his thirty-six years on the Supreme Court, Douglas—misleadingly pigeonholed as a New Deal liberal—was the truest western libertarian of his era. Time and again he was the best friend working people had on the Supreme Court. Douglas always defended the unemployed, the homeless, the freakish,