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alone on single sheets. Considering that many were drawn from a canoe or in the rain, they are quite remarkable.47 Little has been written on Muir as a visual artist, but his drawings of glaciers were impressive. (By contrast, whenever he included humans in an Alaskan landscape, they looked like mere doodles, stick figures, or silhouettes.) What fun it is to study thirty-plus drawings of glaciers sketched between 1879 and 1899. There are pictures of glaciers at Kachemak Bay, Chugach National Forest, and Prince William Sound. But his most loving studies are of Muir Glacier at Glacier Bay, drawn from many different angles.48

After two summers in Alaska inspecting glacial motion—essentially, a study of velocity—Muir returned to northern California a changed man. The American West held a highball fascination for him, and Glacier Bay joined Yosemite as his obsession. “I am hopelessly and forever a mountaineer,” he wrote to a friend. “Civilization and fever, and all the morbidness that has been hooted at me, have not dimmed my glacial eyes, and I care to live only to entice people to look at Nature’s loveliness.”49 Modest, self-effacing, and with a permanent twinkle in his intense eyes, Muir was nevertheless zealous in his approach to everything wild. His enthusiasm for Alaska was so intelligently real that even his critics never tried to belittle him by calling him fanatical about glaciers. “Waking and sleeping, I have no rest,” Muir wrote. “In dreams I read blurred sheets of glacial writing, or follow lines of cleavage or struggle with the difficulty of some extraordinary rock-form.”50

Spoiled by Alaska’s wild wonders, Muir had a hard time readjusting to living in Martinez, California. Domestic life had all the appeal of being chloroformed. Stuck with paying bills, operating an orchard, and answering an ever-increasing amount of correspondence, Muir constantly dreamed of Glacier Bay. He regularly complained to Young, who was doing missionary work in southeastern Alaska, about being stuck in California, and he was desperate for news about his beloved glaciers. Celebrity in America had its strains. Muir was constantly grappling with editors while trying to manage land tracts. Politically active in the saving of Yosemite, Mount Shasta, Kings Canyon, Mount Rainier, and other treasured American landscapes, Muir missed being a wandering glaciologist, working in the glacier lands of Alaska and mastering the art of not fatally slipping. One afternoon Young, who was in the San Francisco Bay area on church business, unexpectedly dropped in on Muir. The naturalist was out in the fields, supervising cherry picking, holding a basket full of fruit. “Ah! My friend,” Muir exclaimed like a wistful prisoner hoping to be freed. “I have been longing mightily for you. You have come to take me on a canoe trip to the countries beyond—to Lituya and Yakutat bays and Prince William Sound; have you not?”51

III

In May 1881, Muir expanded his Alaskan knowledge base by joining the USS Corwin on an expedition up the Arctic coast to search for the missing steamer Jeannette. This voyage afforded Muir the chance to explore the Bering Sea while simultaneously doing a good deed. Muir’s primary goal was to study the ice on the frostbitten islands in the Bering Sea and the Bering Strait. The Jeannette had disappeared off Point Barrow when Muir had first traveled up the Inside Passage. Muir, on the Corwin, now got to expand his field studies to the Pribilof Islands (the largest fur seal rookery in North America) and Kotzebue Sound (home to polar bears and a wide variety of birds). The Lower Forty-Eight had less than 200 square miles of glaciers, in nine states: Washington, Wyoming, Oregon, California, Colorado, Idaho, Utah, Montana, and Nevada. All those glaciers, taken together, didn’t equal a single large one in Alaska. Further expanding his sightseeing, Muir became one of the first humans to set foot on rocky Wrangell Island (between the Chukchi and East Siberian seas at meridian 180). This island had the highest density of polar bears in the world and was