Travels In Alaska

John Muir first visited Alaska in 1879, and he later made several trips there to test his beliefs on glacial activity. The largest tide-water glacier honours his memory properly. His labors were severely disrupted by his passionate leadership of the misguided fight to rescue his beloved Hetch-Hetchy Valley. As he carefully and thoroughly went through the large quantity of Alaska notes that had gathered under his hands for more than thirty years, illness also presented some obstacles. It is futile to conjecture how Muir would have ended the book if he had survived to finish it because his notes on the remaining portion of the expedition have not been located. The fact that his final work concludes with a description of the auroras, however, will make it impossible for anybody to read the description of the Northern Lights without experiencing a sense of artistic appropriateness. The meticulous care that John Muir put into his writing is evident on every page of his manuscripts. He was relentless in his search for the significance of a physiological fact, and because to his amazing physical stamina, he was generally able to track it down to its last hiding spot. Just a few months before he passed away, Mrs. Marion Randall Parsons helped him out with kindness.