John Muir Was a Travel Writer
Long before his extravagantly bearded profile appeared on postage stamps and commemorative coins, John Muir was a struggling travel writer. Muir, revered today as the founder of the Sierra Club(@sierraclub) and an early advocate for national parks, was largely unknown to America’s reading public in 1879 when we first departed San Francisco bound for Alaska’s mysterious Inside Passage, a seafaring route through the densely islander panhandle of America’s northernmost territory. His primary goal was to study glaciers; newspaper travelogues paid the bills. His adventures, guided hundreds of miles by Tlingit Indians paddling a dugout cedar canoe, became rhapsodic dispatches that found an enthusiastic audience. Within a few years, West Coast steamships were hawking Alaska sightseeing trips to the “frozen Niagara” of the Muir Glacier, a spectacular river of ice—today located in Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve—discharging massive bergs from its 300-foot-high face.
From “In John Muir’s Icy Wake” by Mark Adams for the New York Times; Photo by Christopher Miller
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