Retire in Alaska

Travels in Alaska

Description

"Travels in Alaska," by John Muir, reflects Muir's exuberance for life and almost everything he encountered in his many travels. In addition to being an ecologist and traveler, John Muir was a botanist and geologist, a fact which readers will be reminded of through his contemplations of the southeast Africa flora and the activity of glaciers."Travels in Alaska" is John Muir's journal of his 1879, 1880, and 1890 trips to southeast Alaska's glaciers, rivers, and temperate rain forests. For Muir, the wilderness was a medicine or spiritual tonic. Physical impediments and frailties faded into the background when he was alone in the wilderness. Much of "Travels in Alaska" is given to glaciers, including their descriptions, their influence on the landscape, their geological record, the discovery of new glaciers, and other characteristics of these moving rivers of ice. When describing glaciers, John Muir offers descriptive powers unequaled among authors on nature, Time and space almost have no medium in this publication, utterly lost when gazing upon a glacier. If you are looking for a dramatic journey, a travelogue, or a field manual for the Alaskan bush, this book may not be for you. But if you are a nature lover who wants the ranges and glaciers of Alaska to come alive in print, read John Muir's "Travels in Alaska." This was John Muir's last book-he died while preparing it for publication.

Take a trip to last century's Alaska through Muir's clean, easy-going, enthusiastic prose. He wrote the way he took pictures, with insight, attention, care and genuine feeling. It's a lovely look into a beautiful land and its inhabitants the way it used to be, told in a flowing narrative that is far less rushed than contemporary travel tales.

Reviews

Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2010-08-09
Summary: "Breath taking"

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!!!

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Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2010-07-22
Summary: "Travels With John: Better Than Ever 130 Years Later"

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.

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Rating: 3 / 5
Date: 2009-01-06
Summary: "A Visit To Pristine Alaska"

"Travels In Alaska" is, essentially, a diary which John Muir kept during his three visits to Southeastern Alaska from 1879-1890. In the course of his travels he describes the Indians, plants, wild life, mountains and glaciers. He is especially interested in his explorations of the glaciers. He provides the reader with an insight into pristine Alaska. His comments about retreating glaciers are of interest given the current claims of man-made global warming.

The reader comes to respect Muir's love of nature and his bravery, as he paddles around ice bergs, camps on glaciers and enters the domains of bears and whales.

The downside of this is that there is very little analysis beyond what he recorded at the time of his journeys. While his observations hold your interest, Muir's writing style adds little to the narrative. This book pales in comparison to Ranch Life & the Hunting Trail by his friend, Theodore Roosevelt (see my Amazon review).

Overall I enjoyed "Travels In Alaska", but have read better nature books. Perhaps a reader more familiar with the Alaskan Panhandle or outdoor adventures would have a greater appreciation with this work.

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Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2008-02-08
Summary: "Muir and Alaska"

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.

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Rating: 4 / 5
Date: 2007-02-18
Summary: "Southeast Alaska, Once Upon A Time"

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.