Picturesque California and the Region West of the Rocky Mountains, from Alaska to Mexico.

• Main Author: Muir, John
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: Scholarly Commons 1888
• 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/200; https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/context/jmb/article/1199/viewcontent/167.pdf

On Burrow's Bay. ALASKA. The great wilderness of Alaska, with its lofty mountains laden with glaciers and snow, its deep in-reaching fiords and flowery plains, and its boundless wealth of evergreen forests and islands, and shining, singing waters, offers a glorious field for lovers of fountain beauty, much of which is now 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 know 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 view. Gazing from the deck of the steamer one is borne smoothly over calm blue waters, on and on through the midst of a thousand islands densely clothed with well-watered evergreens. The common discomforts of a sea-voyage are not felt, because the ] way is through a network of sheltered channels that are usually about as free as rivers are from heaving waves, and were it not for the brimy odor in the air and the strip of brown alga seen at low tide on either shore, it would be difficult to realize that we are sailing on salt ocean water; we seem rather to be tracing a succession of inland glacier-lakes. Day after day we float in the heart of true fairyland, each succeeding view seeming more and more beautiful. Never, before making this trip, have I found myself embosomed in scenery so hopelessly beyond description. To sketch picturesque bits definitely bounded is comparatively an eas}'- task— a lake in the woods, a glacier meadow, a cascade in its dell, or even a grand mountain landscape J beheld from some clear outlook after climbing from height to height through veiling forests, these may be attempted and some picture more or less telling made of them; for in them we find place | for beginnings, starting from which we may make efforts that we may hope to conclude. But in this f web of scenery embroidering the northern coast there ...