Alaska Scenery.

• Main Author: Muir, John
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: Scholarly Commons 1893
• Subjects: Environmentalist; naturalist; travel; conservation; national parks; John Muir; history; pamphlets; journal articles; speeches; writing; annotation; Archipelago; glacier; glaciers; Alaska; Thousand Islands
• Online Access: https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/jmb/212; https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/context/jmb/article/1211/viewcontent/188.pdf

pA'AyU- MAAIcAi A/c Jf A A 82 THE TRAVELER, I . ALASKA SCENERY. JOHN MUIR. The great wilderness of Alaska, with its lofty mountains laden willi glaciers and snosv, its deep inreaching fiords, flosvery plains, and its boundless svealth of evergreen forests and islands, and shining, singing svaters, offers a glorious field for lovers of fountain beauty, much of which is nosv within easy reach of the ordinary traveler. The trip by steamer, from Puget Sound to the head of the Alexander Archipelago, is perfectly enchanting. Leaving scientific interests entirely out of the count, no excursion that I knosv of may be made into any other portion of the wilds of America where so much fine and grand and novel scenery is so freely unfolded to viesv. Gazing from the decl of the steamer one is borne smoothly over calm, blue waters, on and through the midst of a thousand islands densely clothed with well- svatered evergreens. The common discomforts of a sea voyage are not felt, because the course lies through a net- svork of sheltered channels that are usually about as free as rivers are from heaving waves; and, svere it not for the briny odor in the air and the strip of brosvn alga? seen at losv tide on either shore, it would be difficult to realize that ss'e are sailing on salt ocean-svater; sve seem, rather, to be tracing a succession of inland glacier-lakes. Day after day we float in the heart of true fairyland, each succeeding viesv seeming more and more beautiful. An Alaskan midsummer day is a day svithout night. In the extreme northern part of the territory the sun does not set for weeks; and, even as far south as Sitka at its losvest point, it is only a fesv degrees belosv the horizon, so that the colors of the sunset blend with those of the sunrise, leaving no gap of night-darkness that are almost always present are then colored orange and red, marking, in a very striking svay, the progress of the sun around the northern horizon. The day opens slowly; a losv arch of light steals round to the northeastward, svith ...