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

by Heacox, Kim

  Relationships interested him as much as names, processes as much snapshots in time. He was an ecologist decades before the science of ecology even existed. Despite all he’d learned from nature and books and well-educated company, he made no pretense about being intellectual. In the blistering debate over Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, he at first landed in the pro-Darwin camp, as did most field naturalists, championed by Harvard botanist Asa Gray, as opposed to the anti-Darwin camp championed by Louis Agassiz (who’d died in 1873).

  The anti-Darwin arguments reminded Muir of his father’s narrow-minded condemnations of the new science of geology some thirty years earlier. As the Darwin debate would move into the next century, however, and be picked up by Thomas Henry Huxley and Ernst Haeckel with agnostic overtones, Muir would find himself prizing Darwin as a scientist but not a philosopher. In a book by Alfred Russel Wallace, a Darwin contemporary and fellow evolutionist, Muir would scribble in the margin, “Every cell, every particle of matter in the world requires a Captain to steer it into its place.”

  Where Darwin saw grim competition, Muir saw harmony. “Evolution—a wonderful, mouth filling word, isn’t it?” he would write. But before evolution, Muir said, there had to be “an Intelligence that laid out the plan, and evolution is the process, not the origin, of the harmony.”

  FOR ALL HIS granite-hard Scotch convictions, Muir had an open mind. He could change. Through the influence of friends and books he could see things and digest ideas as he hadn’t before. When he first read John Ruskin during his Yosemite years, in the 1870s, he found the English art historian colored by “conceit and lofty importance.” But after receiving a copy of Ruskin’s collected works some ten years later, during his contemplative Martinez years, Muir found himself admiring the Englishman’s plea to turn away from cities and technology. In Time and Tide, Ruskin awakened Muir to the radical notion that the destruction of nature was the result of not just greed—which was obvious—but a greed allowed to thrive due to systemic flaws in capitalism itself.

  In 1889 Muir and Johnson struck a deal. They would go to Yosemite and visit the place that inspired the first chapter of Muir’s literary career, hoping it would inspire a second. Once there, after breezing up trails and skipping from rock to rock in the middle of a stream, John wrote to Louie, “I fancy I could take up the study of these mountain glories with fresh enthusiasm . . .”

  Writer and editor had a grand but sobering time; in the high country they witnessed illegal lumbering and overgrazing by sheep (what Muir called “hoofed locusts”), and in Yosemite Valley the crass commercialization of tourist sites. One local entrepreneur had diverted part of Nevada Fall into a side cascade to improve the view, please visitors, and make more money. Muir wrote:

  Tinkering the Yosemite waterworks would seem about the last branch of industry that even Yankee ingenuity would be likely to undertake. Perhaps we may yet hear of an appropriation to whitewash the face of El Capitan or correct the curves of the Domes.

  He was not beyond sarcasm or insurrection, or, for that matter, revolution.

  That night by a campfire, Muir and Johnson talked. Johnson was moved by Muir’s love of beauty and his heartbreak at seeing such destruction; he described Muir as having “tears in his voice.” They began to hatch an ambitious plan. Yosemite under protection as a California State Reserve was not good enough. Muir would write two articles for Century magazine. Johnson would lobby friends in New York and Washington. Together they would campaign to create something better, something outrageous: Yosemite National Park.

  And so Muir wrote, but he was tired. He had a deep bronchial cough and nervous indigestion. He needed to get well. This to him meant only one thing: “mountain nourishment,” his best medicine, another adventure north. California was his home and battlefield, but Alaska was his elixir, what he called his “Holy Land,” the wildest place he knew. A single glacier in Alaska might contain more ice than all that existed in the contiguous United States, and Alaska had an estimated one hundred thousand glaciers. And bears, wolverines, wolves, and whales.

  Up there, Muir could be Homer on the Aegean, Humboldt in the Amazon, Huck Finn on the Mississippi, never more alive; and like Mark Twain’s Huck, he might lie on his back one night and look up at the cold, brittle, indifferent stars and wonder “whether they was made, or only just happened.”

  Go, Louie told him. Go north.

  Stay, his doctor said. “If you go on this journey in your condition, you’ll pay for it with your life.”

  “If I don’t go,” Muir said, “I’ll pay for it with my life.”

  They debated.

  Muir went.

  ON JUNE 14, 1890, he sailed from San Francisco on the steamer City of Pueblo. In no time Muir engaged a Scandinavian sea captain he described as “an interesting old salt, every sentence of his conversation flavored with sea-brine, bluff and hearty as a sea-wave, keen-eyed, courageous, self reliant and so stubbornly skeptical he refused to believe even in glaciers.” The Scandinavian said he was headed north to have a boat built in Port Blakely.

  Muir recommended that after he finished his business, “you had better go on to Alaska and see the glaciers.”

  “Oh, I haf seen many glaciers already.”

  “But are you sure you know what a glacier is?”

  “Vell, a glacier is a big mountain all covered up vith ice.”

  “Then a river must be a big mountain all covered up with water.”

  Muir educated him and got him excited, telling him “he must reform, for a man who neither believed in God nor glaciers must be very bad, indeed the worst kind of unbeliever.”

  In Port Townsend, Muir met his friend Henry Loomis, with whom he had climbed Mount Rainier in Washington two years earlier. They sailed for Glacier Bay on the steamer Queen, Captain James Carroll commanding. It rained up the British Columbia coast and Muir didn’t mind as he described scenery “delightful even in the dullest weather.” In Fort Wrangell he watched passengers mob the waterfront shops and pay “high prices for shabby stuff manufactured expressly for tourist trade . . . Most people who travel look only at what they are directed to look at. Great is the power of the guide-book-maker, however ignorant.”

  He missed his friends Reverend Young and Lot Tyeen, who were out of town. Continuing north, Muir studied passing glaciers from every viewpoint, and he noted with pleasure the many stranded icebergs off the LeConte Glacier, and again at the mouth of Sumdum Bay (today’s Tracy Arm). Captain Carroll then steered the Queen up Taku Inlet so the 180 passengers, according to Muir, could see the Taku and Norris glaciers “in the flesh.”

  In the gold-fever town of Douglas, they toured a large mill where six hundred tons of low-grade quartz were crushed every day. Westbound one day after the summer solstice, they crossed Lynn Canal, where “there are now two canneries,” Muir wrote. “The Indians furnish some of the salmon at ten cents each.” The weather was perfect that night, and Muir noted how everybody stayed on deck “to see the midnight sky. At this time of year there is no night here, though the sun drops a degree or two below the horizon. One may read at twelve o’clock San Francisco time.”

  HOW MUST IT have felt for John Muir, fifty-two that summer, when on June 23, 1890, the Queen entered Glacier Bay and steamed directly to his namesake glacier, a massive wall of ice some three hundred feet high, two and a half miles across, thundering icefalls into the bay, a luminous tidewater glacier proclaimed by some as the Eighth Wonder of the World?

  Today’s demographers have estimated that of the roughly 110 billion people who have lived on earth the last 50,000 years, only a small fraction have achieved age fifty and beyond; of those, half are alive today. In other words, Muir was already the beneficiary of a relatively long life. He was famous, yet fame didn’t interest him. He shied away from leadership, carried not an extra ounce of fat, and grew his beard down to his chest. For all her attempts to civilize
him, Louie had failed. At his core, he was still a tramp. With regard to his influence as a writer, he was just getting started.

  In the next two months, July and August, Century magazine would land on the doorsteps of 200,000 American homes with two back-to-back articles by Muir in defense of his California home. Appeals to Congress would flood into Washington, and by the end of the year, Yosemite would be a national park.

  But in the summer of 1890, he had a spirit to revive, a theory to test, a cough to kick. New friends to make. How best to find the boy inside the man? How best to get well? Go north. Travel on a glacier. Sleep on the ice.

  CHAPTER SIX

  no lowland grippe microbe

  THE WORLD is the geologist’s great puzzle box; he stands before it like the child to whom the separate pieces of his puzzle remain a mystery till he detects their relation and sees where they fit, and then his fragments grow at once into a connected picture beneath his hand.

  —Louis Agassiz, 1866

  By 1890, when John Muir arrived in Glacier Bay for the third time, sixty years had passed since the publication of Charles Lyell’s premier edition of Principles of Geology, which introduced the literate world to uniformitarianism and deep time: an earth shaped by slow-moving forces still under way today, an earth not thousands of years old, but millions—perhaps billions—of years old. Forget religious dogma. The world was a puzzle indeed, dynamic, ever-changing, no longer adequately explained by Old Testament text.

  It was instead fleshed out by creative speculation, rigorous field studies, and careful analysis of landscapes and rock types of vastly different ages by men who accepted the constructive criticisms of their peers. As such, they fine-tuned their ideas through the scientific process until they made sense, and a new science was born, the study of the earth called geology, and its subset study of ice as an earth-shaping force: glaciology.

  It was a delightful coincidence for Muir that his life should parallel the formative years of the science of glaciology. So much had been unveiled, yet so many questions remained. How did glaciers work? What secrets did they hold? Why did they advance and retreat, surge and collapse? How extensive had they been in the earth’s past, and for how long? And how might they shape—or be shaped—by the future?

  MUIR AND LOOMIS had been in Glacier Bay for a week, undaunted by the rain, camped on their nine-foot-by-nine-foot-square tent platform near the calving, thundering tidewater face of Muir Glacier, icebergs stranded on shore like diamonds in the rough. At four o’clock in the morning of July 1, 1890, a whistle awakened them. It was the steamer George W. Elder. Muir went out and stood atop a lateral moraine and waved; the Elder tooted its whistle in response. A party came ashore lead by Harry Fielding Reid, professor of geology at the Case School of Applied Sciences in Cleveland.

  “Are you Professor Muir?” he asked.

  While Muir made no pretense to be an academic, many in academic circles admired him. Outside of his 1870s debate with Josiah Whitney over the shaping of Yosemite Valley, wherein time would prove him right and Whitney wrong, Muir would make no major peer-reviewed contributions to the science of glaciology. But he would popularize glaciers unlike anybody else, and be to glaciers what Jacques Cousteau would be to the oceans and Carl Sagan to the stars.

  Conservation was fast becoming his primary aim. In their brief time together, Muir had described himself to Robert Underwood Johnson as an amateur scientist, nothing more, a “self-styled poetico-geologist” who found scientific discourse too dominated by “angular factiness.” Better to write from the head and the heart. The Greeks knew this: pathos, ethos, logos. Leave no part of one’s humanity untouched. According to the British teacher, critic, mountaineer, and poet Terry Gifford, Muir would achieve more in America’s conservation politics “precisely because he declined to adopt the discourse of the professional scientist.” His alliance with Johnson and Century magazine was already bearing proof.

  It took Muir and Professor Reid no time to strike up a friendship, given their shared fascination with natural history in general and glaciers in particular. Reid had come to Glacier Bay to conduct serious studies; he wasn’t traveling alone, or unencumbered. Half a dozen students joined him. The George W. Elder dropped anchor and off-loaded the party’s instruments, tents, personal baggage, and other provisions. Seven to eight tons of freight, Muir estimated. Reid wrote of Muir and Loomis:

  They had come also to study the glacier, and added much to the pleasure of our stay. We immediately set to work to put up our tents, and before evening everything was in good shape. We brought boards from Juneau for flooring, tables, etc., which added materially to our comfort and convenience. A book-shelf held our small library of works on glaciers, logarithmic tables, etc. A gasoline stove enabled us to cook our meals with ease, and campstools permitted us to eat them in comfort. This was to be our base camp and, in honor of Professor Muir, we named it Camp Muir.

  Wrote Muir, “I am delighted to have companions so congenial—we have now a village.”

  Four years earlier, Reverend George Frederick Wright of the US Geological Survey and Oberlin Theological Seminary had visited Muir Glacier and set stakes across its vast surface to find its rate of flow at seventy feet per day in the middle and ten feet per day on its margins, not unlike a river, where friction slows down the current. The fact that it wasn’t advancing, but instead retreating, meant that Muir Glacier was experiencing a net loss of ice. It was starving. Snow accumulation in the mountains had decreased while melting and calving at the glacial terminus had increased. Muir Glacier, according to Wright, must be losing some 200 million cubic feet of ice per summer day, ice discharged off its tidewater face into the sea, a staggering number.

  Wright’s findings, published in his 1889 book The Ice Age in North America, and Its Bearings upon the Antiquity of Man, were severely criticized by other academics, perhaps justifiably. But Muir and Reid knew there was no snobbery like academic snobbery. Perhaps Wright hadn’t been so wrong. It was time to find out.

  For days Muir and Reid tramped about, taking measurements, making observations, sometimes together, sometimes each off on his own, or accompanied by Loomis or Reid’s students. Muir discovered what he called “fossil wood” on the west side of the glacier, concentrated in a stratum of sand and clay. He later found “a large grove of stumps in a washed-out channel near the glacier-front but had no time to examine closely. Evidently a flood carrying great quantities of sand and gravel had overwhelmed and broken off these trees, leaving high stumps.”

  He had seen stumps like these on previous adventures in Glacier Bay, and puzzled over them. Later, he again discovered a stand of what he called “monumental stumps in a washed out valley of the moraine. . . . The largest is about three feet in diameter and three hundred years old.” But when had they died? And how exactly? “How these trees were broken off without being uprooted is dark to me at present,” Muir observed, his keen mind already at work to unveil the geological history of Glacier Bay. It was like old times when he hiked the High Sierra and probed its mysteries, or when he first came to Alaska, a place he found “abounding in beginning lessons on landscape making.”

  One week after Reid’s arrival, the steamer Queen returned and disembarked many of its 230 passengers, who mobbed Camp Muir. “What a show they made with their ribbons and kodaks!” Muir observed,

  All seemed happy and enthusiastic, though it was curious to see how promptly all of them ceased gazing when the dinner-bell rang, and how many turned from the great thundering crystal world of ice to look curiously at the Indians that came alongside to sell trinkets, and how our little camp and kitchen arrangements excited so many to loiter and waste their precious time prying into our poor hut.

  Earlier that day, knowing the Queen would leave with outgoing mail, Muir composed a letter.

  To Mrs. Muir. Glacier Bay. Camp near eastern end of ice wall.

  Dear Louie:

 
The Steamer Queen is in sight pushing up Muir Inlet through a grand crowd of bergs on which a clear sun is shining. I hope to get a letter from you to hear how you and the little ones and older ones are.

  I have had a good instructive and exciting time since I wrote you by the Elder a week ago. The weather has been fine and I have climbed two mountains that gave grand general views of the immense mountain fountains of the glacier and also of the noble St. Elias Range along the coast mountains, La Perouse, Crillon, Lituya, and Fairweather. Have got some telling facts on the forest question that has so puzzled me these many years, etc., etc. Have also been making preliminary observations on the motion of the glacier. Loomis and I get on well, and the Reid and Cushing party camped beside us are fine company and energetic workers. They are making a map of the Muir Glacier and Inlet, and intend to make careful and elaborate measurements of its rate of motion, size, etc. They are well supplied and will no doubt do good work.

  I have yet to make a trip round Glacier Bay, to the edge of the forest and over the glacier as far as I can. Probably Reid and Cushing and their companions will go with me. If this weather holds, I shall not encounter serious trouble. Anyhow, I shall do the best I can. I mean to sew the bear skin into a bag, also a blanket and a canvas sheet for the outside. Then, like one of Wanda’s caterpillars, I can lie warm on the ice when night overtakes me, or storms rather, for here there is now no night. My cough has gone and my appetite has come, and I feel much better than when I left home. Love to each and all.