Customer Reviews

Travels in Alaska

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If you're new to John Muir's writings, please don't start with this one. It's a worthwhile read in its own right, don't get me wrong. But read _My First Summer in the Sierra_ or a Muir biography like Michael P. Cohen's _The Pathless Way_ before you move on to this one. Get a good dose of what the naturalist is like and learn some of his background, and then you'll be in the proper frame of mind to tackle _Travels in Alaska_. Otherwise, this book is just one glacier after another. And bless his heart, Muir wants to see them all. And climb them and explore them and sketch them and hike their entire lengths and write about them ad nauseum. He leaves his companions in his wake and puts himself squarely in the face of isolated danger over and over again. Read this book first, and you'll think he's insane. Know his roots in Wisconsin and his good work in California, and you'll be better able to appreciate what he thinks of and does in the Alaska of the late 1800s.

I confess up front, it's been a few years since I read Muir's Travels in Alaska. Yet significant aspects I remember well. Given Muir's exuberance for life and almost everything he encounters in his travels, one almost looses view of Muir the botanist and geologist. But not quite. Here we find the author contemplating the activity of glaciers and documenting the flora of southeast Alaska. Muir (who tended strongly toward vegetarianism) gleefully entertaining himself by foiling duck hunters. Baffling the locals by happily wandering out into major storms.
The book is a journal of Muir's 1879, 1880, and 1890 trips (he wouldn't mind if we called them adventures) to SE Alaska's glaciers, rivers, and temperate rain forests. He died while preparing this volume for publication.
I remind myself, and anyone reading this, that Muir isn't for every reader. And, as other reviewers have stated, this may not be the volume in which to introduce oneself to the one-of-a-kind John Muir. One reviewer doesn't think that Muir is entirely credible in these accounts. I won't say whether or not this is wrong, but I tend to a different view. For some of us -- and certainly for Muir -- wilderness is a medicine, a spiritual tonic, so to speak. For the individual effected in this way, physical impediments and frailties rather dissolve away when he is alone in wildness. I once heard Graham Mackintosh (author of Into a Desert Place) speak of this. In all of his travels alone in the desert, he doesn't recall having ever been sick. This may not sound credible to some, but I strongly suspect it is true.
If you like Muir's writings, read this book. If you like the stuff of Best Sellers, perhaps you should look elsewhere.

From the title, one would think this a type of travel journal, a panorama of episodes along the way, a sequence of stations between the starting off point and the destination. Instead, the overall weight of the book is given to glaciers, their descriptions, their influence on the landscape, their geological record, the discovery of new glaciers, and other characteristics of these moving rivers of ice. While Muir offers descriptive powers unequaled among authors on nature, never repeating himself though constantly repeating his subject, the sheer repetition tends to bog the work down. Two whole pages might contribute to our view of a particular glacier, and suddenly Muir reports that he's finished a 200-mile leg of his journey on foot. He tells us when he's climbed a glacier, and along the way we've missed an entire week. Time and space almost have no medium in this publication, utterly lost when gazing upon a glacier. For nature lovers who will never go to Alaska, the descriptions in this book make the ranges and glaciers come alive in print, but as a dramatic journey, a travelogue, or a field manual for the Alaskan bush, this book forms only a vague shadow.

The beauty of this wonderful reprinting is how it shows John Muir as a person, how it helps us to understand the dynamic and overwhelming beauty of Alaska, and the changes in the people of Alaska. Muir's complete, tireless, and joyful commitment to nature comes through on every page. The book unintentionally provides an excellent portrait of the kind of inexhaustible devotion it takes to change the world as did Muir. The book also provides a stunning portrait of Alaska in the latter part of the 19th Century and allows one to compare the Alaska of those days with Alaska of earlier times and of today. The biggest changes are in the glaciers and in the people. The glaciers have receded dramatically as a natural part of their centuries' long retreat. It is interesting to compare what Muir saw with the experience of Vancouver almost exactly 100 years earlier (ca. 1793). Vancouver could hardly enter Glacier Bay. Muir could enter quite some distance, but the glaciers were still the dominant features. Today, the glaciers have largely receded into deep valleys. Muir encountered people in Alaska living largely as they had for centuries. They were hunters and fishermen and lived in small groups along the shore line. As Jonathan Raban points out in the intricately woven fabric of his sublime book "Passage to Juneau," the people of southeast Alaska considered the sea to be the real environment of their lives while the land was considered dangerous and unknowable. They lived along the shore and knew how to live off and with the sea year round. The lives of the Alaskan people are very different today but greatly influenced by the past. Raban often characterizes Muir's writing as overblown and florid. However, it is a portrait of a man, a maritime land and a people. To do justice to those three, the book had to be what it is - an astonishingly colorful and detailed portrait in words.

John Muir's "Travels In Alaska" is his accouts of his trips to Southeast Alaska in 1879, 1880, and 1890. Southeast Alaska 125 years ago was sparsely settled and poorly explored; Muir's adventurous spirit and enquiring mind led him to investigate the numerous inlets and glaciers in the area, including the magnificent and much-celebrated Glacier Bay.

Muir's simple, muscular prose weaves a fascinating narrative out of descriptions of the people, wildlife, and geology he encounters on his journey, suffused with his endless sense of wonder at the landscapes in which he saw the hand of God. The reader can hardly help but be carried along by Muir's enthusiasm. Muir's descriptions may be most relevant to those traveling Southeast Alaska by cruise ship, for a sense of what the landscape looked like before the population reached today's size and spread. Those not interested in the travel aspects of the book and in numerous descriptions of glaciers may find this book less interesting.

This book is highly recommended to fans of John Muir's writings, and to those planning a trip through Southeast Alaska.

John Muir's diaries and stories are enchanting - and especially welcome during my long, hot drives around Los Angeles this time of year! Just hearing narrator Lee Salibury talk about the glacier formations is refreshing - and the sound effects and music add so much to the ambience! The six hours of reading seem to FLY by, and make summer traffic bearable. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!

Having been to Yosemite multiple times, I was very interested in his book about Yosemite. He is an English teacher's dream, the way he expresses himself and the descriptions he uses to tell about his journeys. So, when we went to Alaska, I bought this book and couldn't put it down. I was never "bored or unhappy" with the story. I think Yosemite was one of John Muir's favorite places. I remember him saying, in this book about Alaska, that "someday I think of Alaska being a lot like The Yosemite as the glaciers have been melting for 200 years", and this was written in the 1800s. I think one of the other reviewers mentioned this also. So, what's global warming? Also he tells of how he feels when he sees the Northern Lights, as if the Savior was coming to earth. Many things impressed me about John Muir and the way he sees the earth and how he would protect it, without being preachy. I read some good reviews here and they touched my heart as I feel the same way as do they. Thank you for this opportunity to view my thoughts.

John Muir is an interesting fellow - and in a way, these books are about him as a person just as they are a description of his journies in the world. Having been to Alaska, it's truly a sight of beauty that may make you believe in a higher power to create something this amazing.

It's hard to add something original after so many reviews other than I'm glad that I sat down and read this book, and go to see Alaska through the eyes of someone there over 120 years ago.

For the Kindle version, there's no Table of Contents, so you can't skip around between chapters. Other than that, it's a free book, and worth downloading if you're interested in Alaska, glaciers, or Muir himself.

I have traveled to Alaska twice, and I simply cannot get enough of the glaciers. I wanted to read this because I had heard that Muir too felt the same that I feel of the glaciers. I was NOT disappointed! His trek to seek out the glaciers reminds me very much of how I would like to seek out each and every glacier. To me climbing the face of a glacier is just a dream, a dream that you can almost live out while reading this book. I felt like I was a part of the glacier crevices or part of the ice flow. I was traveling in the canoe right along with Muir. This was the first book of his that I read, and now I am hooked!!!

Travelling Alaska with John is to see, hear, feel, taste, smell, experience the response of a God-intoxicated man to almost unearthly splendor. Muir's passions were elemental: apprehending the Divine through an understanding of nature, and hence, the protection and preservation of this voice of the sublime.

He travelled to Alaska five times over a 30 year period. This book, only completed a few years before his death, polishes the field notes of his earlier trips and offers almost unedited, his journals from the last journey. Muir's interests begin with geology, specifically how the U-shaped valleys of both Yosemite and the Alaskan fjord-land resulted from glacial actions. Beginning with ice, they include the land, the trees, the waters, the fish, the First Americans living in the harsh beautiful world, the scientists, the missionaries, transportation, food, and in a chapter that cries to be read aloud, Muir's experience of a sunrise like the eighth day of Creation and of the Northern Lights.

One remembers vignettes of one's own travels. So vivid, so immediate are these stories that they become part of your own memories. Raining is it? Experience laying your already soggy sleeping bag down in a bog so wet you strip off and shiver your way through the night, then arise---not like new-made bread---but to wring the water from your clothes and bag and slog on. Thinking of what it would be like to walk across that glacier? Start out early, accompanied by a dog who had more loyalty than brains and got over jagged ice frise-de-cheval points, across crevasses, up treacherous slopes----to get to the other side, and then come back at night, having to encourage the now-alarmed dog to leap those widening chasms, risking your own neck to get the crittur home.

Those going to Alaska could hardly have a better companion. The book is portable and a bargain. And those who travel widely through the frigates of books, like Emily, will find their world enlarged and enobled in the company of this good and brave man who did so much to preserve our wild, beautiful places.