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of the Adirondacks “forever wild” movement, enacted through legislation in 1895, Zahniser committed himself to protecting wilderness for “the eternity of the future.”26 A bureaucratic infighter, one of the sharpest lobbyists in Washington, D.C., Zahniser ceaselessly championed creating wilderness areas on public lands. Starting in 1935, he wrote a column for Nature. In 1945, he was asked to be executive director of The Wilderness Society; it was a post he kept until his death on May 5, 1964. Four months later, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Wilderness Act of 1964—a milestone in land protection—originally drafted by Zahniser; 9.1 million acres were saved as “untrammeled by man” zones.

Snyder called his lookout shelter—a prefabricated structure built by the CCC at 8,128 feet—“Crater Shan,” Chinese for high point. Emptying himself of ego and pretension, he basked in its utter commonness. Snyder recognized anew, in the North Cascades, that money-consciousness, the reigning motivator in postwar America, was counterproductive. Withdrawing national forests from preservation, he feared, would lower water tables and accelerate the process of erosion. “Who can leap the world’s ties,” Han Shan had asked in a poem Snyder later translated. “And sit with me among the white clouds?”27

Snyder relished his Zen hermitage. He kept his ax sharp. Chinese calligraphy and meditation were part of his daily regimen. Insatiably he read the texts of Mahayana Buddhism. Some mornings his little shelter was awash in fog. On a clear day, however, he could almost see the Hope Range of British Columbia in the far distance. As an old Zen saying went, everything was “blue heaped on blue.” In the center of his cabin was an Osborne fire finder, a rotating dish map with a peep sight; it could see over far ridges in all directions. Snyder hung Tibetan prayer flags on his walls. After having climbed Mount Hood numerous times, he had developed a pantheist attitude toward mountains as living entities; Aldo Leopold would have approved. Snyder was disdainful of the “hostile, jock Occidental mind-set” prevalent in Europe and the United States, the idea that mountain climbing was an act of conquering. “I want to create wilderness,” Snyder was fond of telling friends, “out of empire.”28

II

Deeply attuned to his surroundings, Snyder learned, that summer in the North Cascades, how strange being alone in the wild can be. Unlike Robinson Jeffers, the great nature poet of the California coast who enjoyed interacting with seabirds and raptors more than with people, Snyder, perhaps because he was reading Buddhist texts on Crater Mountain, craved people when he came down from his lonely post. The essayist and novelist Edward Abbey, in Abbey’s Road, wrote of his own experiences as a paid fire lookout in the Southwest: “Men go mad,” he said, “in this line of work.” Abbey imagined a married couple getting assigned by the U.S. Forest Service to fire-watch together in the North Cascades: “Any couple who survives three or four months with no human company but each other are destined for a long permanent relationship,” he wrote. “They deserve each other.”29

Committed to forestry, Snyder signed up to be a lookout again in June 1953; this time Sourdough Mountain was his assignment. Joining Snyder that summer in the North Cascades was another graduate of Reed College, Philip Whalen, whom Kerouac described in The Dharma Bums (under the name Warren Coughlin) as “a big fat bespectacled booboo . . . a hundred and eighty pounds of poet meat.”30 After serving in the U.S. Army after World War II, Whalen visited the Vedanta Society in Portland, his hometown, and became interested in eastern religions. Whalen had brought with him to Sank Mountain Ezra Pound’s Cantos and William Blake’s Poems, and he bragged of “absorbing” vitamins out of these volumes in the North Cascades. Also, Snyder had introduced him to D. T. Suzuki’s books on Zen. Snyder and Whalen—who talked by radio from their respective peaks—were paid a handsome $700 a season for being lookouts. At Sourdough, as at Crater,