Travels in Alaska

2019 Reprint of 1915 Edition. Illustrated with photographs by Herbert Gleason. In the late 1880s Muir made several trips to the pristine, relatively unexplored territory of Alaska. Irresistibly drawn to its inspiring glaciers and its wild menagerie of bears, bald eagles, wolves and whales, he recorded his experiences and reflections in Travels in Alaska, a work he was in the process of completing at the time of his death in 1914. Travels in Alaska is a record of three journeys of exploration by canoe and afoot among the fiords and mountains of Southeastern Alaska. Although prospectors, traders and a handful of missionaries were scattered among the islands and were beginning to push up the great river valleys, the greater part of Alaska was in 1879 still unexplored, its fiords uncharted since Vancouver's day. With Fort Wrangell as his base, Mr. Muir made several short steamer trips, which gave him the opportunity to learn something of the glaciers and forests of the vicinity. After his return from an extended trip up the Stickeen River in October, he set out with Mr. Young, a Wrangell missionary, and a crew of Indian canoe men, to visit the fiords to northward, near the country of the war like Chilcat tribes. Their eventful journey culminated in the discovery of Glacier Bay and its glorious company of glaciers, the largest of which bears Mr. Muir's name. The following year he continued his explorations, particularly in the region of Sum Dum Bay and the Taku Fiord, and in 1890 returned a third time to the Muir Glacier for a more extended exploration of its upper fields and study of its flow.