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By Root 2912 0

self-discovery filled with an infinity of unknowns. Inner peace could be found in glaciers. Southeastern Alaska was an immortal land that would, in turn, immortalize him.13 Picking his way through a sea of sparkling bergs, sometimes leaping across slippery, deteriorating ice floes, Muir reveled in the innate dignity of his surroundings. “A new world is opened,” Muir wrote in his journal, “a world of ice with new-made mountains standing vast and solemn in the blue distance roundabout to it.”14

It took Muir only a day to become a booster for Alaska’s magnificent Glacier Bay. The land uplift rate—1 inch per year—was among the highest in the world, because the glaciers receded, thus removing their considerable weight from the land. In his wilderness journalism Muir urged Americans to journey to paradisiacal Alaska and let their jaws drop. Although Muir didn’t discover Glacier Bay, his enthusiasm made the bay internationally celebrated. “Go,” Muir cried, “go and see.”15 Alaska, purchased from Russia for $7.2 million only twelve years prior, had just started to be discovered by nature lovers who cruised up the southeast coast from Seattle. Muir, in a way, was the first great ecotourist of Alaska. Go to Kachemak Bay . . . Catch a halibut . . . Go pick yellow-reddish salmonberries and currants on the banks of the Chilkat River . . . Tramp the glacier ice mantle of the Coast Range . . . Go eye bald eagles nesting in Juneau . . . Go gather seashells at Calvert Island beach during low tide . . . Go spy on the white mountain goats of Howling Valley . . . Go to the boulder-bound Chugach Mountains . . . Go see the northern lights’ “auroral excitement” and “bright prismatic colors” flash across the starlit night at the Yukon River . . . It was the Earth’s halo . . . Didn’t you know?16

Muir’s first landfall aboard the Dakota was Fort Wrangell, Alaska. Here he joined thirty-year-old S. Hall Young, a Presbyterian missionary hoping to Christianize the Chilkat Tlingit. Together Muir and Young would travel all over the Inside Passage, constantly in ice range, to Sitka, the Stikine River, Fairweather Range, and, last but not least, Glacier Bay. Young later wrote a memoir—Alaska Days with John Muir—about their fine times together. But Fort Wrangell, crude and vulgar, devoid of even an iota of charm, was an end-of-the-line outpost where lawlessness reigned supreme. A grumbling Muir didn’t cotton to the devil-may-care attitude of the Euro-Americans looking for quick mining profits in such a picturesque setting. Fort Wrangell was an ugly row of low wooden buildings (not too far as the crow flies from today’s Misty Fiords National Monument Wilderness). Some of Muir’s “Go . . . go . . . go to Alaska” evangelism tapered off in Fort Wrangell, where he slept on the dusty floor of a carpenter’s shop. Muir described his quarters as “a rough place, the roughest I ever saw . . . oozy, angling, wrangling Wrangell.”17 Locals didn’t know what to make of Muir. “What can the fellow be up to?” one resident inquired. “I saw him the other day on his knees looking at a stump as if he expected to find gold in it. He seems to have no serious object whatever.”18 A few years earlier, Young had tried breaking colts but had ended up with both shoulders seriously dislocated. Carrying a backpack up glaciers was understandably challenging for him. “Muir climbed so fast that his movements were almost like flying, legs and arms moving with perfect precision and unfailing judgment,” Young wrote. “I must keep close behind him or I would fail to see his points of advantage.”19

Clad in a Scottish cap and long gray tweed ulster, Muir could have been a shepherd from the island of Skye. Lured by his ethereal surroundings, he even wandered around in a rainstorm, eager to learn what “songs” the Alaskan trees “sing” when wet.20 Muir wanted to map Glacier Bay—shaped like God’s horseshoe and opening out to the Gulf of Alaska, with immense glacial walls of ice tumbling out of snouts at Icy Strait—as a freelance service for the U.S. government. No cartographer had yet done the job. Mapmakers