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

by Heacox, Kim

In other words, they’re reference points, places to be quiet and acquire wisdom; to listen and give thanks.

  As Leopold would one day declare, “I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in. Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?”

  PRESIDENT CALVIN COOLIDGE signed the executive order that created Glacier Bay National Monument in February 1925. The Alaska economy did not fail. The monument was not a monster. The world continued to turn, the population of Alaska continued to grow, slowly; the glaciers continued to retreat, some quickly. And William Cooper, soft-spoken as ever, continued to visit the bay every five years or so to study the shimmering blue ice fronts and his little pioneering plants.

  Accompanying Cooper on each visit was Tom Smith, a Juneau-based boat skipper who didn’t like the monument, saying it locked up the land and restricted prospecting and the scrappy entrepreneurial spirit that made America great. The two men agreed to disagree and maintained a friendship, though Smith, according to most accounts, could never let it go.

  Early in their adventures, he anchored off Rendu Glacier while Cooper went ashore to hike about. When the glacier calved and sent a large wave down the inlet, Smith’s boat got so violently tossed about (with Smith hanging on tight) that he announced he would never again approach a tidewater glacier. Years later, however, when Johns Hopkins Inlet opened up behind the retreating glacier to become the wildest inlet in the bay, an icy inner sanctum embraced by peaks more than twelve thousand feet high—what John Muir would call “mountain nourishment” of the highest order—Smith couldn’t help himself. He and Cooper once again approached a massive ice wall and had a grand time.

  Elsewhere in the bay, Cooper investigated the interglacial stumps that had so perplexed Muir in his day. Later, radiocarbon dating would determine the stump was four hundred years old when it died some seven thousand years ago, on that same spot. Buried in gravel that was bulldozed by the advancing ice front before the tree was snapped off higher up, it became entombed under the glacier and exposed again after hundreds—maybe thousands—of years, when the ice retreated and meltwater carried away much of the gravel.

  How many times glaciers had ebbed and flowed over this land was hard to say. Each ice advance largely obliterated the evidence of previous events. It made a powerful metaphor, how a resilient land attracts resilient people, and the pioneer destroys the thing he loves, just as the little strawberry flower, so tough but only so big, prepares the soil for the alder that displaces it, and the spruce and hemlock that in turn displace the alder.

  “One does not ordinarily think of strawberries growing next door to a glacier,” wrote Cooper. “But Alaska is full of paradoxes.”

  Tom Smith loved the land no less than Cooper, but he could never come to accept it as a national monument. Dave Bohn would write:

  And over and above the argument, the recurring paradox; namely that those who move away from the crowded centers of population—­for many reasons but always at least to find more space for themselves, proceed not only to ruin the land for any who would follow, but also proceed to do their utmost to bring as many as possible to crowd the very space they sought. In the history of this country the multitude almost without exception has followed. And almost without exception the land has been ruined. But not always.

  While enamored with prospecting, the thought of large-scale industrial mining frightened Smith. Could one be permitted without the other? The strawberry flower without the alder?

  At one point Smith wrote a letter to Cooper:

  Dear Bill:

  Pleased to hear from you. I think you better be prepared for the worst when you start for Alaska again. You may not be pleased with the going ons in Glacier Bay. If the mineing company finds a large body of nickel ore there, there will be a long, dirty greasy stinking cable running from the Bradey Glacier right to the head of the bay—and could be several thousand dirty mineres working there—and freighters hundreds of feet in length with dirty black smoke roleing out of the funnells—turning that beautiful blue ice into an awful color. Then next would be a smelter and from past sad experience we know what happened at Treadwell Mine on Douglass Island just killed all that fine young groth of timber. The worst is yet to come. The Canadians may open a port in the head of the Bay—and they would have dozens of steamers plowing through the Bay—and hundreds of deck hands, longshoremen, grease pots etc. It is really too awful to contemplate . . . Hope you will excuse my punctuation, as I do not have the book larnin that you have.

  Best regards to you and Mrs. Cooper.

  Tom Smith

  A crew of mineral explorers working for the Fremont Mining Company did indeed find a promising copper-nickel deposit in a nunatak (rock outcropping) in the Brady Icefield. The following summer Fremont made test drills through three hundred to four hundred feet of ice into the bedrock below the glacier, while a second mining company, Newmont Exploration Ltd., buzzed the ice field with helicopters, landing here and there to take surface samples. According to historian Theodore Catton,

  Analysis of the many core samples confirmed the existence of a large mineral deposit underlying the Brady Icefield. By 1963, the mining companies had filed twenty claims and invested $800,000 in mineral exploration. At the same time, an increase in prospecting was causing the monument staff “grave concerns.” A jump in gold and silver prices attracted dozens of new companies into the field. During the summer of 1964, there were no fewer than five companies prospecting in the monument: two in Muir Inlet, one using a drill rig near Lake Seclusion, one using helicopters without a permit, and one that made a mess of an area on Lituya Bay. In a report titled “Information Required for Legislation to Redesignate Glacier Bay as a National Park,” [Superintendent L. J.] Mitchell included photographs of the degradation caused by this last operation—of “slashed forests, heavy equipment abandoned to rust, and supplies left to rot.”

  Mitchell and his staff referred to it as the “legalized rape of Glacier Bay.”

  “Legalized” because the strongest opposition to the establishment of Glacier Bay National Monument had come from the pro-mining/prospecting community, including none other than the US Geological Survey’s Alfred Brooks, an early explorer in Alaska (who had the world’s northernmost mountain range named after him). Brooks wrote to Cooper, “I do not think it is possible or advisable to establish a park in Alaska from which the prospectors are shut out.” Novelist Rex Beach wrote a feature article in Cosmopolitan magazine entitled, “The Place is Alaska—the Business is Mining.” His point: What better way to put America back to work during the Great Depression than to open up Alaska in general, and Glacier Bay in particular, to mineral exploration.

  In another article, a copy of which he reportedly sent to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Beach asserted that the greater portion of the Glacier Bay region

  is absolutely barren and the only timber, such as there is, lies along the southern edge. It is not a good game refuge, nor are there any fishing streams or lakes in which salmon spawn. Presumably there are some sheep and goats in the St. Elias Range but it is the last place anybody would go for bear, moose or caribou. In fact the whole area is like a haunted house and I doubt if ten white men have visited it in the last ten years aside possibly from some surveying parties.

  In a book published by the Sierra Club thirty years later, Dave Bohn would respond that Beach was “utterly wrong.”

  At the time, however, in the 1930s, with America down on its luck, Beach’s appeal played well into Roosevelt’s New Deal image of putting the country back to work.

  William Cooper wrote to National Park Service Director Arno Cammerer, “If Congress passes the proposed bill . . . I cannot imagine a precedent more dangerous to each and every reservation under control of the Park Service.”

  It felt like the ghost of Hetch Hetchy. Was no place safe from enterprising, industrial man? Even glaciers could be mined
.

  The provision to allow mineral exploration in Glacier Bay passed into law in 1936, one year after Robert Marshall, Aldo Leopold, Olaus Murie, and other visionaries—fearful this kind of thing could happen again and again—founded The Wilderness Society.

  HETCH HETCHY got started around then, the first water arriving into San Francisco ten years later than promised, twenty years after John Muir’s passing. The dam ended up costing one hundred million dollars, more than twice the original estimate, all while the city of Oakland, across the bay, found a cheaper water source and began to use it. But of course Oakland’s source provided no electric power, and that was always the point with Hetch Hetchy. Although the 1913 enabling legislation said power would be sold only by public utilities, the Pacific Gas and Electric Company, with so many politicians in their pockets, wrested control of the power partway between the mountains and the city and got what it wanted: huge profits.

  The dam advocates had always said the flooded valley would be beautiful and provide wonderful recreational opportunities, with a new lake for boating and good fun. Historian Stephen Fox observed,

  In the reservoir itself, as the water level rose and fell with the changing seasons the shoreline was marred by slimy mud and decaying vegetation. Nothing could grow at the edge of the artificial lake. Under moonlight, with tree trunks scattered around like so many bodies, it resembled a battlefield one day after the fight: a wasteland bearing stark testimony to man’s befuddled ingenuity.

  Had it been left pristine, the valley could have provided joy and wonder for tens of millions of visitors. It could have been a life-changer, a place of inspiration like her more famous sister, Yosemite Valley, what John Muir called “God’s garden.” Now nobody went there. It was a dead place, drowned by shortsightedness. Fox concluded that from the perspective of many years later, the dam “seems a comprehensive mistake.”

  HOW THEN to save Alaska? Let it be, said the many disciples of John Muir, a growing legion of young, environmentally aware Americans. Slow down. Go softly with an open heart. Stop calling it a frontier. The last frontier is not Alaska, outer space, the oceans, or the wonders of technology. It’s open-mindedness. Honor the land and its first nation peoples, and their ability to acquire wisdom, sustenance, and happiness from the wild plants and animals around them. Learn through story. Sleep on the ground. Listen.

  Travel by kayak and canoe.

  In 1964, while mining companies ran around Glacier Bay staking claims and making noise with their helicopters and drills, Congress passed the Wilderness Act, an unprecedented piece of legislation designed to protect wild places from our worst impulses and leave them “untrammeled.” Seven years later, in 1971, the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) bequeathed to Native Alaskans forty-four million acres (roughly 12 percent of Alaska) and nearly one billion dollars to invest in their future. There would be no Indian reservations in Alaska. Instead, ANCSA created thirteen regional corporations and more than two hundred village corporations for Native Americans to manage their resources and investments. Buried in section 17(d)(2) of ANCSA was a clause directing the secretary of the interior to withdraw up to eighty million acres for study and possible inclusion as new national parks, preserves, monuments, and wildlife refuges.

  The very thing Tom Smith didn’t like—government intervention—was the only thing that could save Glacier Bay and other parts of Alaska from becoming what he didn’t want, a mine pit. A large and complicated bill, the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA) would be nine years in the making, the first—and last—of its kind, filled with compromise and provisions for protecting wild areas and safeguarding indigenous ways of life.

  “We had to get it right,” said National Park Service historian William E. (Bill) Brown, a member of the NPS D2 task force that came north in the mid-1970s to select new parklands to be protected in perpetuity. “This was our chance to save America. Many of us had been too young to fight in World War II; that rankled us. Now was our time. This was our chance to do things right, and—by God—we did. We saved Alaska. We saved America.”

  It would have made William Cooper smile. And John Muir sing.

  EPILOGUE: 2012–2014

  blue ice and brown bears

  NEARLY EVERY DAY of summer two large cruise ships slide into the cold nutrient-rich waters of Glacier Bay National Park. A small boat comes alongside, and park rangers climb a ladder to board each ship. One ranger heads to the bridge, another to a large lounge, where they spend the day explaining to passengers—often two thousand or more per ship—the natural and human histories of Glacier Bay: the behavior of glaciers, the feeding strategies of humpback whales, the arrival of sea otters that didn’t exist in the bay twenty-some years ago and now number in the thousands, the power and intrigue of coastal brown bears, the homeland story of the Huna Tlingit, the complexities of primary plant succession, the ramifications of climate change. A journey that took John Muir and his companions weeks by canoe now takes days by cruise ship. Passengers feel no discomfort. Hardtack and seal meat appear on no menus. The buffets last for hours and offer a dozen confections of carved and ornamental chocolates. The linen is clean. The pillows are soft.

  This is a special day, the one day on the weeklong itinerary that focuses on wild Alaska. By request of the National Park Service, the ships offer no casino gambling this day, no dance lessons, art auctions, comedy shows, or other activities that might conflict with the rangers’ presentations and with the ostensible reason why everyone is there, the park itself: the whales, bears, mountains, and ice.

  Yesterday the ships spent the day in Skagway; the day before that, Juneau. Tomorrow, Sitka. Jewelry stores and T-shirt shops. Rides on helicopters and trains. Today, however, the focus is blue ice and brown bears in a 3.3-million-acre national park—a park 50 percent larger than Yellowstone—that’s also an international biosphere reserve and a world heritage site. While a few people on board have no idea where they are, most are keenly aware they’re in Glacier Bay and are up early to see it all. They’ve dreamed of this for years. They’ve read London’s Call of the Wild, McPhee’s Coming into the Country, and John Muir’s Travels in Alaska.

  JOHN MUIR has been gone for a century, yet he lives. Across America, schools, parks, and awards are named for him. Universities have his books as required reading. New biographies explore his thousand-mile walk to the Gulf of Mexico, his boyhood in Scotland and Wisconsin, his trip to South America and Africa in his sunset years, and his time in Alaska. Film, art, stage plays, and musical scores are inspired by his life and vision. When California had to choose a design for its commemorative quarter, hundreds of submissions—the iconic Hollywood sign, the 1849 Gold Rush, the Golden Gate Bridge—fell away until one remained: an image of John Muir. “Muir lit the torch of conservation in our state,” said Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. “He has inspired generations of Californians to preserve our natural beauty, and this is what makes him so special.”

  If caught in a storm halfway up a mountain, Muir would go up, Thoreau down. He was fearless, rapturous, infectious. Storms were his friends, mountains his sanctuaries.

  How did he attain this passion for Nature?

  “All through history,” observes Thomas J. Lyon, a Muir scholar and professor of English and environmental studies, “we have searched for states of mind which could transcend the apparent alienation of communicable consciousness from the overall stream of life.” The answer, he says, lies in poetry, religion, and mystical literature, and how they contribute to “the background urge of wilderness writing. John Muir had that urge; he felt keenly the difference between the language-mind and the wilderness-mind.”

  What he looked for, Lyon believes, and what he found in Alaska on a scale that inspired him for the rest of his life was a transcending metaphor—glaciers—that “arose naturally from what glaciers do: they flow. In their stately progress and again in their retreat, they break and gri
nd rocks, move soil, make watercourses, create homes for plants and animals, affect the weather and much else. They are history, but their participation in the world is alive.”

  THE CRUISE SHIPS arrive at Margerie Glacier, in Tarr Inlet, the upper West Arm of Glacier Bay, seventy miles north of the bay’s entrance, and spend an hour or so off the tidewater face, all while lunch is served buffet style. On sunny days passengers take their meal out on deck to eat and drink while they watch and listen to the glacier. Many find themselves slowing down to take it in, the ice face staring back at them. The glacier might calve many times or not at all. There’s no telling.

  The mood is festive, yet most people say little. They stare, transfixed by the power and beauty of an ice wall some 250 feet high and a mile wide, standing there in defiance of a warming world. The rangers rove. They’ve spoken over the loudspeaker earlier and given formal presentations inside a large auditorium. Now it’s time to hit the outside decks and let the ice do the talking. One should never upstage a glacier.

  A few people have questions.

  “Why is the ice blue?”

  “How old is the ice?”

  “How long is this glacier?”

  “Is the glacier advancing or retreating?”

  “Is climate change a factor?”

  KEVIN RICHARDS, a seasonal park ranger/naturalist in his nineteenth summer in Glacier Bay, explains that the science of glaciology has matured considerably since John Muir’s time. We now have ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica that tell us the same thing: for the last 800,000 years, and probably longer, carbon dioxide (CO2) in the earth’s atmosphere has fluctuated between 180 and 280 parts per million (ppm).