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By Root 2901 0

night while the Tlingit guides stayed at camp, the ecstatic Muir would climb up the glacial slopes to feel the full power of phantasmagoric geology at work. During the summer months it stayed light almost all night long in Alaska. This worked to Muir’s favor. At a glance Muir knew if a glacier was advancing or retreating, or whether the precipitation during any given year had caused the ice to surge.28 Like Michelangelo measuring luminosity in the Sistine Chapel, Muir studied the Inside Passage as light struck the dense glacial ice. Every shade of blue in the spectrum dominated by a wavelength of roughly 440 to 490 nanometers miraculously appeared, scattered by the crystalline ice; and the blue glow was dispersed and refracted in such a subtly distinguished array of tints that no words existed for them in Webster’s Dictionary.29 Unlike the Alaska Range, which lay in the district’s interior, and where the glacial process was slowed by the fierce cold, the Fairweather Range and Coast Mountains, where temperatures were mild yet there was lots of compact snow, were an ideal setting for glaciers to develop. A layer of snow could transmute into glacial ice in a few decades. For the study of glaciers, the Inside Passage was like Greenland, a hypernatural landscape that seared itself forever in Muir’s fervent imagination.

For Young, keeping up with Muir’s glacier terminology could be frustrating. Absolute verity was essential to everything Muir did. When the professor espoused the gospel of glaciers, Young was reduced to listening. There was a glossary of Muir’s terms to understand: hanging glacier (above a cliff or mountainside); kettle pond (created when a massive iceberg melted, leaving behind a water-filled hollow); firn (grainy ice, which is formed from snow about to become glacial ice). Before traipsing around Glacier Bay with Muir, Young hadn’t realized that in 1794 the British explorer George Vancouver (British Columbia’s fantastic city is named after him) had demarcated the entire Glacier Bay area as a single ice mountain, which then separated into the twelve smaller ones. For Young every moment with the great Muir was like being taught by Charles Darwin or Thomas Huxley. Naturally inquisitive about the Glacier Bay, Young asked his naturalist friend a lot of questions. The world’s authority on glaciers—John Muir—was canoeing with him for hours at a time in Alaska, espousing the glacial gospel like a preacher at a revival meeting.30

Instead of being self-centered, Muir at Glacier Bay was life-centered. Feeling he belonged to wild Alaska, a child of the tidal flat, Muir understood anew that the whole Earth was a watershed, just one giant dewdrop. He thanked God for such a magnificent plan. To get around the Alexander Archipelago, Muir used a reprint of George Vancouver’s old nautical charts to help him navigate.31 At Glacier Bay he filled his journals with vibrant writing about his canoe trips, the maritime currents, and the ice features. Ice chunks drifted all around them as they canoed; they felt minuscule. Wave-sculptured pieces of ice floated by blue-green runaway rafts with a mind of their own. Alaska—whose name derived from the Aleut word aláxsxaq, meaning, roughly, “great land”—truly came as advertised. And glaciers spanned the entire southern perimeter of the colossal territory, from just north of the Canadian border in the southeastern region to midway along the Aleutian Islands chain. Less than 0.1 percent of the nearly 100,000 Alaskan glaciers had a name. “I stole quietly out of the camp, and climbed the mountain that stands between the two glaciers,” Muir wrote from the Coast Mountains. “The ground was frozen, making the climbing difficult in the steepest places, but the views over the icy bay, sparkling beneath the stars, were enchanting. It seemed then like a sad thing that any part of so precious a night had been lost in sleep.”32

Muir ended up publishing numerous articles in the San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin about the Inside Passage, where “ice and snow and newborn rocks, dim, dreary, mysterious