Travels in Alaska Book

A little embarrassed to say this is the first of Muir's books I've read. After all, this is a man with plants, animals, mountains, a glacier, trails, a wilderness, and a forest named after him, is the founder of the Sierra Club, and a true original. He is part of, arguably the father of, an era when environmentalism was innocent love of nature.

To share his pure joy of being in the Alaskan bush is more than worth the effort of working through his archaic style. The anecdotes of what he experienced are an added bonus: "Then a box was brought from some corner and opened. It seemed to be full of tallow or butter. A sharp stick was thrust into it, and a lump of something five or six inches long, three or four wide, and an inch thick was dug up, which proved to be a section of the back fat of a deer, preserved in fish oil and seasoned with boiled spruce and other spicy roots...I was unable to taste it even for manners' sake." And: "While we were yet half a mile or more away, we heard sounds I had never before heard--a storm of strange howls, yells, and screams rising from a base of gasping, bellowing grunts and groans...Our guides quietly recognized this awful sound, if such stuff could be called sound, simply as the 'whiskey howl'...the whole village was afire with bad whiskey. This was the first time in my life that I learned the meaning of the phrase 'a howling drunk.'"

If you don't try taking this all at once, but dip into it occasionally, you'll enjoy discovering a sense of who John Muir was as well as his descriptions of the vast natural wonders of Alaska.