John Muir and the Ice That Started a Fire: How a Visionary and the Glaciers of Alaska Changed America

by Heacox, Kim

  Ever thine, J. M.

  Tourists off a steamship admire icebergs stranded at low tide near the face of Muir Glacier, in Glacier Bay.

  Photo courtesy of the National Snow and Ice Data Center

  MUIR WENT ALONE. He probably never intended to have companions on his journey into the white unknown of Glacier Bay, but his letter to Louie said otherwise to set her mind at ease. Loomis and two Indians accompanied him early on to help haul gear over the moraine. With a handshake they turned back, and Muir was gone. He pulled a three-foot-long wooden sled “made as light as possible,” loaded with a sack of hardtack, pemmican and nuts, a little tea and sugar, his caterpillar sleeping bag, and a meager change of clothes. He held an alpenstock, a long wooden pole with an iron-spiked tip used in the Alps since the Middle Ages for travel on ice and snow. He moved with confidence and chose his route carefully.

  Crevasses everywhere. Seracs, moulins, moraines. Nunataks in the distance. Meltwater running atop and throughout the glacier; the ice itself alive, moving. Everywhere a profound, embracing quiet. Stillness.

  There was no place he’d rather be. Alone on a vast Alaskan glacier. More than a few people thought him a crank, a kook.

  CONSIDER the European occupation of America, a sweep of history beginning with William Bradford, who described a “hideous and desolate wilderness” when he stepped off the Mayflower in 1620. Thus began what historian Roderick Nash would call, “a tradition of repugnance.” The America that lay before Bradford and his fellow Pilgrims was no paradise, wonderland, or national park. Such concepts were unthinkable back then. Wild America was a threat to their survival, an alien place filled with wolves, thieves, and the unknown.

  In Middle Ages Europe, dark forests had always been dangerous. Mountains were evil. Landscape art did not exist. Goodness and spiritual guidance were found in churches and cathedrals, not in the woods. Wilderness was good for one thing only: to be transformed into civilization. Nash observed: “Anticipations of a second Eden quickly shattered against the reality of North America. Soon after he arrived, the seventeenth century frontiersman realized that the New World was the antipode of paradise . . . If men expected to enjoy an idyllic environment in America, they would have to make it by conquering wild country.”

  And conquer it they did. By 1820, two hundred years after the Pilgrims landed, the virgin hardwood forests of New England were gone, and Americans were moving west with Old Testament fervor and insatiable appetites for raw land. Calls from the pulpit exhorted that those lands be “brought under the axe and plow.”

  Small criticisms began to surface, mostly from Europeans with Romantic tastes such as François-René de Chateaubriand and Lord Byron, who confessed in 1816:

  There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,

  There is a rapture in the lonely shore.

  There is society where none intrudes . . .

  I love not man the less, but nature more.

  IN 1823, fifteen years prior to John Muir’s birth, James Fenimore Cooper became an American literary hero with the publication of his third novel, The Pioneers. In this and his next four novels, published over eighteen years, Cooper created Natty Bumppo, a native protagonist who found purity in the wild, deceit in the city. With this likeable, admirable character, Cooper, according to Nash, “discovered the literary possibilities of the wilderness. Wild forests and plains, as Cooper both knew and imagined them, dominate the actions and determine the plots of these novels . . .”

  No major writer had ever done this, made wild nature itself a character with depth and tone. As such, Natty Bumppo, also known as Leatherstocking, found clarity and strength from what Nash called the “holiness of wild nature . . . Indeed Natty is his own best evidence, since lifelong exposure to the woods has given him an innate goodness and moral sense.” Nash concluded, “Both Natty and Cooper believed in the ‘honesty of the woods!’”

  Traveling through America in 1831, French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville observed that many Americans saw the pioneer as the point of the spear of progress; the plow as God’s trowel. “Democratic nations . . .,” Tocqueville wrote, “will habitually prefer the useful to the beautiful, and they will require that the beautiful be useful.” Utility was everything. If a man struggled to survive in the wilds and didn’t know what he was doing, he’d always fight nature instead of learn from it, or live with it, as Natty did. Nature would be his adversary. In the end, man would lose. He’d lose his soul, his humanity, his grace; he might get rich and live in a big house, but he’d lose the vibrant, bountiful world around him. He’d inevitably lose the clean sky over his head.

  How to stop this? We must transcend ourselves; move away from our materialism and back into the essence of our humanity. If any single moment in the history of the United States best voiced this call for transcendentalism, it came twenty years after Tocqueville’s visit, in 1851 (the year Cooper died and Herman Melville published Moby Dick), when a thirty-four-year-old, slightly built pencil maker named Henry David Thoreau, having spent twenty-six months living at Walden Pond in a cabin he had built himself, stood before the Lyceum Society in Concord, Massachusetts, and announced, “In wildness is the preservation of the world.” His point: Men are seduced by material gain and trivial sport. “For one that comes with a pencil to sketch or sing, a thousand come with an axe or rifle.” The challenge was to moderate, simplify; find the Leatherstocking in each of us, a woods-wise goodness combined with the better refinements of civilization.

  It was no surprise that Thoreau became an activist, a writer-moralist jailed for a single night because he opposed slavery and refused to pay taxes to support America’s war with Mexico. “Henry, what are you doing in there?” Ralph Waldo Emerson allegedly said upon visiting him. Thoreau responded, “Ralph, what are you doing out there? ”

  How can you not be an activist?

  The world was coming undone.

  When Emerson visited Muir in Yosemite in 1871, the old man spoke at length about his protégé, Thoreau. Intrigued, Muir read Walden the next year, and for the rest of his life he would encourage friends and acquaintances to read anything by Thoreau. It would be no surprise to many when Muir himself became a writer, a moralist, and an activist.

  But at this point, in 1890, he was an explorer, perhaps remembering his Thoreau: “be . . . the Lewis and Clark and Frobisher of your own streams and oceans; explore your own higher latitudes.”

  EVERY DAY would be a big adventure. Muir’s goals on this solo trip were straightforward: lose the nagging cough he’d had for three months and explore his glacier and its seven major tributaries. Quickly, his investigative mind went to work, noting trees “storm-bent” from southeast winds; “margin terraces” composed of “grist of stone . . . rolled and sifted;” water trapped in crevasses that refroze to create “irregular veins seen in the structure of the glacier.”

  Early on he observed the powerful force of glaciers against the mountain flanks: “Nothing could be more striking than the contrast between the raw, crumbling, deforested portions of the mountain, looking like a quarry that was being worked, and the forested part with its rich, shaggy beds of cassiope and bryanthus in full bloom, and its sumptuous cushion of flower-enameled mosses.”

  He observed mountain goats, ravens, and ptarmigan and heard marmots and wolves. He called flowers by their scientific names, but ptarmigan he generalized. All his life Muir would show more scientific interest in flowers than birds, except if the bird were a favorite, like his beloved water ouzel of Yosemite.

  On the morning of day four, he arose early to hear wolves in a place he called Howling Valley. During breakfast the wolves sounded nearer; Muir feared “they had a mind to attack me.” He took shelter against a large boulder where he could use his alpenstock to defend against a “frontal attack.” The wolves never appeared; Muir moved on. He gave many places names: Snow Dome Mountain, Nunatak Islands, Divide Glacier, Girdl
ed Glacier, White Glacier, Braided Glacier, Berg Lake, Howling Valley, Granite Canon Glacier, Gray Glacier, Dirt Glacier, and Quarry Mountain. Only a few of these exist on maps today.

  Interglacial stumps from an old spruce-hemlock forest sheared off by advancing glaciers thousands of years ago in Muir Inlet

  Photo by Frank LaRoche, courtesy of the National Snow and Ice Data Center

  Though the exact route of Muir’s ten-day journey in July 1890 is somewhat guesswork, it’s safe to say that all the places where he walked on glacial ice are now ice-free. Muir Glacier today, only a fraction of its size in 1890, now rests at the head of Muir Inlet, some thirty-plus miles farther north, and is no longer tidewater. Neither are any of its tributaries except one: McBride Glacier. The glaciers of Muir Inlet, on the upper east side of Glacier Bay, are today vestiges of what they used to be.

  Process, process, process. How? And why? Muir wanted to know how water and ice shaped the land, why this flower grew here and not there. “How often and by how many ways are boulders finished and finally brought to anything like permanent form and placed in beds for farms and fields, forests and gardens.”

  Across his boyhood haunts of Scotland and Wisconsin Muir had seen—but not fully understood, until now—the handiwork of glaciers, the clues left for those with keen eyes willing to slow down and look around. Out here Muir could develop his imagination, think about the how and the why of things, be on fire with excitement, and get well.

  He slept on his sled and made little fires from fossil wood to heat his tea. At one point, with no fossil wood, he shaved off portions of his sled to make kindling.

  He wrote in his journal: “It has been a glorious day, all pure sunshine. An hour or more before sunset the distant mountains, a vast host, seemed more softly ethereal than ever, pale blue, ineffably fine, all angles and harshness melted off in the soft evening light.”

  After a dinner of hardtack, he felt he could climb a mountain a second time, but pulling the sled had tired him.

  Glissading down a steep slope, he hit blue ice and skidded out of control but landed without injury:

  Just as I got up and was getting myself oriented, I heard a loud fierce scream, uttered in an exulting, diabolical tone of voice which startled me, as if an enemy, having seen me fall, was glorying in my death. Then suddenly two ravens came swooping from the sky and alighted on the jag of rock within a few feet of me, evidently hoping that I had been maimed and that they were going to have a feast. But as they stared at me, studying my condition, impatiently waiting for bone-picking time, I saw what they were up to and shouted, “Not yet, not yet!”

  As day six ended he curled into his sleeping bag and wrote of “soft, tender light . . . cozy and comfortable resting in the midst of glorious icy scenery.” The next day was equally sunny, “a glorious and instructive day.” His shoes were nearly worn out, his feet wet every night . . . “but no harm comes from it, nothing but good.” Day eight he awoke feeling tired, but after a meager breakfast he began to sketch and look about and soon felt he could climb five thousand vertical feet. “Anything seems easy after sled-dragging over hummocks and crevasses, and the constant nerve drain in having to jump crevasses . . . ”

  After so many sunny days, he admitted, “my eyes are much inflamed and I can scarce see.” He had snow blindness. All the lines he sketched appeared double. “Nearly blind,” he began his journal on day nine. “The light is intolerable and I fear I may be long unfitted for work.” He improvised a poultice (what he called “wet bandages”) and admitted that this was the first time in Alaska he’d experienced too much sunshine. Clouds moved in later that day, to his great relief. He made a pair of snow goggles but was afraid to wear them against his inflamed face. His eyes improved the next day, and he made many observations on the workings of Muir Glacier. A hummingbird twice visited his camp, attracted to the red liner of his sleeping bag.

  While making his way across the glacier, he fell into a concealed crevasse and plunged into icy water that was over his head. He climbed out and hurried to a protective cliff, where he stripped down, threw the wet clothes into a “sloppy heap,” and climbed into his sleeping bag to shiver through the night and finally sleep.

  On July 21, he awoke to rain and found putting on his wet clothes “a miserable job . . . far from pleasant.” But he was healed. “My eyes are better and I feel no bad effect from my icy bath. The last trace of my three-month’s cough is gone. No lowland grippe microbe could survive such experiences.” After dinner, as Muir was going to bed, he saw his friends Reid and Loomis walking over the moraine, coming to ferry him back across the inlet.

  In Camp Muir he wrote, “I had a good rest and sleep and leisure to find out how rich I was in new facts and pictures [sketches] and how tired and hungry I was.”

  MUIR WOULD NOT head home to California for a month after this. He savored his time up north, for once he returned he knew his life would be busy in a way it never had been before.

  In late July the Queen arrived with a load of dimension-cut lumber for a cabin. During a rainy spell, Muir and the others erected it, putting in two windows, a door, and a stone chimney. Wrote Reid, “Prof. Muir takes his meals with us and we use his house to sit in. The fire-place is progressing; in the meanwhile, we have built a fire on some sand in the middle of the floor, which warms the house but causes a good deal of smoke.”

  John Muir (far left) with Harry Fielding Reid (far right) and Reid’s geology students at the cabin they built in August 1890, at Muir Point, Glacier Bay

  Photo courtesy of the US National Park Service

  From their vantage on a beach terrace near Muir Inlet, with the glacial terminus not a mile away, they saw ptarmigan, oystercatchers (nesting on the shore), harbor seals, and, out beyond the icy waters, an occasional humpback whale. “And at odd moments,” biographer Donald Worster would write, “some great jewel of ice would break away from the crystalline wall and plunge noisily into the sea, sending spray hundreds of feet high. Here was danger, but here also was knowledge and radiance enough to satisfy Muir’s insatiable appetite.”

  Inspired by the country and also Muir’s own exploits, other members of the party pushed themselves deep into rugged terrain, over rock and ice and crevasses that plunged into blue oblivion, in some places roping up and ascending slopes as steep as fifty degrees. Reid and two others climbed Pyramid Peak; mountaineer Dave Bohn would one day observe: “[I]t was the first roped ascent in that country. There would not be another for forty-one years.”

  On August 22, Muir, his cup full, finally boarded the Queen back home for California. The wilderness had nourished and fortified him. He had walked the “crystalline prairies” of ice far away from what Worster called “the heat and smoke of politics.”

  Muir was healed. He was a new man.

  At home, with high winds ravaging the grapevines, and ground squirrels doing their usual damage, and only four Chinese laborers to do the fieldwork, and Wanda and little Helen with rotting teeth (Helen had had two extracted; the girls would brush better once John got home), Louie had written to her husband, “… the good Father above will not fail to lead you, His own dear child, in safety through all the darkness of Alaskan storms.” Her enduring image of Alaska was of one fraught with bitter cold and ferocious storms.

  Reid and party stayed in Muir Inlet a while longer to do their scientific work by water in a sixteen-foot rowboat and a three-man dugout canoe, attempting to measure the glacier’s movements by setting stakes across its breadth near the tidewater face, a dangerous job. They never quite succeeded. Reid would leave Glacier Bay determined to return.

  MUIR ARRIVED HOME in September to what must have been a glorious reunion with his girls, Wanda, age nine, Helen, four. Excitement brewed on many fronts. His articles in Century magazine had stirred the American public beyond his wildest dreams. The commercial and selfish exploitation of his t
emples of Nature had become so egregious that people were waking up and taking action, some loudly, others quietly, but action nonetheless, broad, swift, and deep.

  Louie gushed, “Many good Californians are rejoicing over the beginning of success for your noble effort to save our Sierra woods and gardens from the hands of manifold destroyers.”

  Letters flooded into Congress and democracy worked. A bill proposing a “Yosemite National Park” was adopted by the House Committee on Public Lands, which stated:

  The preservation by the Government in all its original beauty of a region like this seems to the committee to be a duty to the present and future generations. The rapid increase of population and the resulting destruction of natural objects make it incumbent on the Government in so far as may be to preserve the wonders and beauties of our country from injury and destruction, in order that they may afford pleasure as well as instruction to the people.

  The bill passed the House and Senate, and on October 1, 1890, it was signed into law by President Benjamin Harrison. That same season Congress created another national park in California, later named Sequoia, to protect the world’s largest living organisms.

  The mood was contagious. In a nation where bison were slaughtered by the tens of millions and Indians hoodwinked off their lands if not murdered in their tents, national parks were catching on. Before the end of the century, Mount Rainier National Park would be added in the Pacific Northwest. And in the first decade of the next century, a naturalist/hunter/conservationist named Roosevelt would occupy the White House and do things that were still unimaginable in the 1880s. Yellowstone, created in 1872, was no longer the national park.