Reviews for Travels in Alaska

The average rating for Travels in Alaska based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-12-21 00:00:00 Ricardo Chiriboga In my year of reading Canada and Alaska, nobody has written as eloquently about glaciers as John Muir. His reverence for the natural world and his fearlessness in exploring it shines through in Travels in Alaska, the book he was writing when he died in 1915. I spent some time comparing his photos to present day and some of his observed glaciers from the 1870s-1890s are only rivers now. Considering the era it must be said that his descriptions of the native populations are at times somewhat horrifying. He travels with missionaries because they have preexisting relationships with the indigenous people and better trekking gear, but he makes some side comments about how he is spreading the gospel of glaciers. He also titles a chapter "Discovering Glacier Bay" which, I mean come on, he didn't discover it, he was led there by local guides. . But this is a classic for a reason. I bought it in Alaska at an indie bookstore and that made my armchair return to that place even more special.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-12-06 00:00:00 Daco Solidus 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.