![]() ![]() ![]() Bald eagles circled overhead, flocks of scoters skimmed over the water, but the only signs of man were the occasional seine boats fishing for salmon. “past forests and waterfalls, islands and mountains and far azure headlands.” Hours passed without sight of a human habitation. “The island-bound channels are like rivers,” he wrote, “the tide-currents, the fresh driftwood, the inflowing streams, and the luxuriant foliage of the out-leaning trees make this resemblance all the more complete.” My wife and I sailed from Vancouver, steaming slowly north and west for four nights and three days, “tracing shining ways through fiord and sound,” as Muir puts it. This is the country of Muir’s Travels in Alaska. We had been well advised to enter Alaska by ship through the historic Inside Passage, an islandsheltered waterway extending for almost a thousand miles from Puget Sound to Skagway, near the border of the Yukon. Still largely a virgin land, it offers a Godgiven opportunity to practice the principles of conservation that we have learned elsewhere at such appalling cost. It is not only a joy but a responsibility. That amazing feat of construction, the Alaska highway, gets you to Anchorage and Fairbanks and northeast to Circle but it is an artery without veins, a trunk road that has yet to sprout branches. Most striking, to eyes accustomed to maps crisscrossed with highways, is the virtual absence of roads. Look at the globe and you will sec that Nome is west of Hawaii, in the last time zone before tomorrow. Point Barrowwill reach to the Great Lakes Ketchikan, southernmost city in the coastal strip, will be in the Atlantic off Florida, and the Alaska Peninsula will cross Texas to the Mexican border. ![]() Superimpose the outlines of Alaska on a map of the continental United States, placing Fairbanks, the principal inland city, on St. Sheer size becomes here a quality as well as a quantity distance is a palpable fact, of which you are always aware. A month’s travel and camping, barely touching on its wonders, can at least give you the sense, if not the substance, of this vast area which is indeed a country in its own right. TO THE lover of pure wilderness.” wrote John Muir eighty years ago, “Alaska is one of the most wonderful countries in the world.” It still is. ![]()
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