Travels in Alaska by John Muir

ABOUT TRAVELS IN ALASKA

In the late 1800s, John Muir made several trips to the pristine, relatively unexplored territory of Alaska, irresistibly drawn to its awe-inspiring glaciers and its wild menagerie of bears, bald eagles, wolves, and whales. Half-poet and half-geologist, 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. As Edward Hoagland writes in his Introduction, “Acentury and a quarter later, we are reading [Muir’s] account because there in the glorious fiords . . . he is at our elbow, nudging us along, prompting us to understand that heaven is on earth—is the Earth—and rapture is the sensible response wherever a clear line of sight remains.”

ABOUT JOHN MUIR

JOHN MUIR was born in 1838 in Scotland, and immigrated with his family in 1849 to the United States. In 1892, he and his colleague Robert Underwood Johnson founded the Sierra Club, of which Muir was president until his death; he… More about John Muir