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in the Columbia Slough, using Roger Tory Peterson’s A Field Guide to Western Birds.8 His nomadic yearnings were inspired by Woody Guthrie’s life and music. At heart Snyder was an itinerant poet with a deep love for mountain trails and for the Industrial Workers of the World, or IWW—the Wobblies—and their lore. Much like Bob Marshall, he was equally comfortable with bookish academicians and with working-class people whose creed was self-sufficiency. Open-minded, uncorrupted by conformity or by the consumer culture, Snyder labored as a timber scaler at the Warm Spring Indian Reservation in central Oregon and—determined to be a poet like Robinson Jeffers and William Carlos Williams—started developing a new, sparse style of poetry: no word was wasted. He pledged to treat the planet with respect, as the North American Indians did, and he had an intuitive understanding, reinforced by his long treks into the North Cascades, that earth was a holy, living being, a single entity. But his poetry was also informed by biology, forestry, socialism, Buddhism, Paul Bunyan, and Native American customs. Snyder treated animals with particular kindness and gentleness, like such earlier, pioneering advocates of animal rights as John Quincy Adams, John Burroughs, and Henry Bergh. One of his close friends at Reed College was Martin Murie, whose parents were Mardy and Olaus Murie.9

In June 1952, the twenty-two-year-old Snyder started working for the U.S. Forest Service at Marblemount, Washington, in the northern Cascades, where there was evidence of ancient volcanic upheaval in all directions.10 This was the Skagit district of Mount Baker National Forest (sometimes called America’s Alps). The North Cascades had about 300 glaciers; only Alaska had more. Having experienced many YMCA summer camps at Mount Saint Helens and many trails in Columbia National Forest (renamed Gifford Pinchot National Forest in 1949), Snyder was erroneously convinced that to be a fire lookout was rather easy work, far simpler than scaling timber: that he would get to live in splendid isolation in the Cascades, would call headquarters on a Motorola PT 300 radio if he saw smoke rising from a distant burn, and meanwhile would read books for pay. But Snyder’s dream soon came up against reality. “Boy,” a forest ranger warned him when he showed up for duty, “you have no idea what you’ve gotten yourself into.”11

At one time, many youngsters wanted to be Daniel Boone or Kit Carson—outdoorsmen who could track a whitetail deer (Odocoileus virginianus) and survive in a blizzard. Snyder’s boyhood idols were John Muir and Ernest Thompson Seton. The Sierra Club had done a marvelous job of presenting Muir as a lovable long-bearded prophet of the wild kingdom. “Muir inspired me, as a lad, on the practical level of boldly going out and staying longer in the woods with less gear, and having the nerve to do solo trips,” Snyder recalled. “So I did (for example) some lengthy trips in the summer of 1948 in the mountains north of Mt. St. Helens in the Washington Cascades, including some third-class rock scrambles.”12

Snyder had been assigned to the Granite Creek guard station, high up near snowcapped Crater Mountain, for the summer of 1952. In the winter, its rocks looked like blocks of ice and there was scant vegetation. But in the summer, this part of the North Cascades was invigorated with life. To get to the little ranger shack at Granite Creek, Snyder had to hike fifteen miles from the roadhead, into the primeval forest. The job called for an outdoorsman, able to clear trails through thickets, chop wood, and haul in hay from settlements lower down the mountain. Forest rangers throughout the Cascadian interior laughed at the skinny kid from Reed College, who was still trying to grow his first beard but who had actually volunteered for the desolate fire tower in the North Cascades. Over the summer, Snyder learned that miners and loggers were marvelous characters but poor stewards of the ancient forests. All over Washington, Weyerhaeuser—one of the largest pulp and paper companies in the