The Quiet World_ Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 - Douglas Brinkley [7]
Both Muir and Stickeen did a lot of fancy footwork, leaping across crevasses like Dall sheep in search of lichens. When a forty-foot crevasse manifested itself in front of him, Muir feared death. Somehow they had gotten themselves stuck in an ice maze. Muir was not a man prone to panic. But the only way out of his predicament was to cross an ice bridge eight feet below him. Muir dropped down, somehow managing not to slip—a slip would have meant instant death. The warm rain was creating a melting effect. Using his ax pick, Muir now made his way across the bridge, inch by inch. Poor Stickeen was terrified, howling and barking in fear of being left behind. Muir coaxed his dog to muster courage and follow his path. Eventually the frightened dog scaled down the glacier and somehow managed an acrobatic walk across the ice bridge. Muir and Stickeen embraced each other with a kind of shivering born-again love. “The joy of deliverance burned in us like a fire, and we ran without fatigue,” Muir wrote, “every muscle with immense rebound glorying in its strength.”40
Once back from the trip, Muir fleshed out the story to publish as an article for Century and eventually as an essay-length book, Stickeen. When it finally was published in 1909, it became a solid best seller. Besides using his journal notes, Muir had drawn on George Romanes’s Animal Intelligence, published in 1881, to include new scientific data on the psychology of nonhumans.41 “The spread of evolutionary thinking, animal-welfare legislation, bird-watching, and other challenges to homocentrism all gave this story of an ordinary-looking but brave little dog a deeper significance,” the biographer Donald Worster explained in A Passion for Nature, “exactly as Muir had hoped.”42
The Tlingit had made Muir an honorary chief during this visit in 1880; they called him “Great Ice Chief.” The indomitable Muir routinely camped alone to study the calving glacier more closely.43 Crouching to study the ice for hours at a time, he gleefully started naming landmarks around Muir Glacier as if they were boyhood friends dyed blue: Black Mountain (5,130 feet), Tree Mountain (2,700 feet), Snow Dome (3,300 feet), and Howling Valley—all part of today’s Muir Glacier, which is a feature in Glacier Bay.44 He drove stakes into the ice so that he could take measures on future trips. Young tells a comical story about what a powerful whim it was for Muir to designate nameless features. One afternoon Muir named an entire area after his Presbyterian friend. “Without consulting me, Muir named this ‘Young Glacier,’ and right proud I was to see that name on charts for the next ten years or more,” Young recalled in Alaska Days. “But later maps have a different name. Some ambitious young ensign of a surveying vessel, perhaps, stole my glacier, and later charts give it the name of Dawes.”45
Pilgrimages to Glacier Bay became Muir’s Alaskan trademark. After his second trip in 1880, he returned to Alaska four more times, longing for the ethereal highs of Glacier Bay, the life-affirming crisp gray weather, the no-man’s-land of wingspread mountains unfolding seemingly forever.46 With imaginative leaps Muir’s Alaskan journals sang Whitmanesque rhapsodies about the dazzling “thunders of plunging, roaring icebergs,” surrounded by avalanche chutes and ice fields. And then there were frozen granite wilderness places—like Tracy Arm, Misty Fjords, and South Prince of Wales—which Muir embraced with the same love he held for Yosemite. Travels in Alaska was published in 1915, the year after he died. It’s a valentine to Glacier Bay.
On all of his trips to Alaska, Muir sketched glaciers with pencil or ink in his journals. Some of the drawings—housed in the Holt-Atherton Special Collections at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California, the primary depository for Muir’s papers—stand