John Muir believed that his beloved Yosemite valley was formed by glaciers of the past. This theory met with stiff opposition from his peers and contemporaries. But unlike his distractors, Muir spent hours and days lying on valley rocks with ‘patient brooding’ to ask questions, whose answers could be his riposte: ‘Where did all that ice come from and where did it go?’ To find answers, Muir invested many summers in Alaska, where he visited and ‘discovered’ the Glacier Bay in ‘the end of October, 1879’.
“If my son comes not back, on you will be his blood.” ~ Mother of Kadechan, a Muir expedition crew-member
To discover the glaciers of Glacier Bay, Muir had an outdated chart (created by the HMS Discovery captain Vancouver in 1794), a crew of four that included an evangelist and three Sitka Indians, and a canoe that had room for very little after seating these five men. Local Indians didn’t approve of this trip. With winter right around the corner and limited provisions available to the party further up the bay, this trip sure seemed destined for the doom. Crew members’ mothers and wives didn’t held their angst back. It took the evangelist’s assurance for people to calm down and the journey to begin.
“Muir must be a witch to seek knowledge in such a place as this, and in such miserable weather” ~Toyatte, the expedition captain (by virtue of being the canoe-owner).
Within a few days, the tour faced substantial challenges that discouraged Indian crew members severely. They were shocked by Muir’s adventurous spirit that ventured out into icy mountains and waters even when thunders rolled over. Dreading the ‘treeless, forlorn appearance' of the area, they considered heading back. With every passing storm, the dissent grew. Then, Muir made a speech to his crew that was laced with deep Muir-ish sentiments that we all have come to admire today. That speech, which called for trusting the ‘heaven’ and putting fear away, galvanized the crew and made them sentimental. They decided not to care even if the 'canoe were to get crushed by icebergs' because on their way to the next world they would have excellent companions. Thus reinvigorated, the crew moved further north towards mighty glaciers that no human eyes from the developed world had ever seen before.
“It presents… many shades of blue, from pale, shimmering, limpid tones in the crevasses and hollows, to the most startling, chilling, almost shrieking vitriol blue on the plain mural spaces from where bergs had just been discharged.” ~John Muir (The discovery of Glacier Bay)
The party reached the head of the bay, where mighty glaciers blocked their view and path forward. While others set up camp, the ecstatic Mr. Muir ran out to climb a mountain in the sleety rain to get a ‘broader outlook’ of that icy empire. From his vantage point, he saw and sketched ‘ineffably chaste and spiritual heights’ of the Fairweather Range, and several great glaciers that flow from those mountains. That night, the happy crew sat by a large fire celebrating their success amidst ‘thunder of the icebergs, rolling, swelling, reverberating through solemn stillness’. They were tired, but too happy to sleep.
PS: Glacier Bay, as we know it today, didn’t exist when Vancouver charted the area in 1794. A century later, Muir found glacier-lines had receded by 18-25 miles from lines in Vancouver’s chart and called Glacier bay ‘undoubtedly young’. Today, most glaciers in the bay have receded and rest behind Vancouver's lines by scores of miles. If not impaired by global warming, these glaciers may return because it is their nature to cyclically recede and burgeon in geological time. Above, you may see two glaciers: Johns Hopkins–the wide one, and Gilman–the petite glacier underneath Mt. Abbe. Muir didn't see them; these are 30-40 miles north of the glacier line during Muir’s expedition. Exceptionally, the handsome Johns Hopkins glacier – whose mile-long face you see above but can’t see it wearing many stripes of medial moraines like a fashion conscious urbanite – is currently advancing every year. While there, I was absolutely enthralled by those thunderous claps of glaciers calving, but was saddened at not being able to witness Muir’s ‘crowds of bergs packed against the ice-wall’. Today, due to much warmer water temperature in this area, icebergs have disappeared. What was once an icy and spiky outer curtain wall of several thousand icebergs that defended the snow-white Fairweather Range, is today a dilapidated garden of growlers (smaller fragments of ice).
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