HOWLING VALLEY
Edward Harriman had not forgotten about his bear. As the Elder entered Glacier Bay, Captain Peter Doran struggled to find anchorage in the eighty fathoms of water just two miles off Muir Glacier’s face. A photo taken by Hart Merriam shows a slurry of densely packed bergs bobbing in waters that have the consistency of a poorly blended daiquiri. Muir knew this country well; during an extended visit in 1890, he had constructed a small cabin at the foot of the glacier. With bear hunting once again on the agenda, Muir conveniently recalled once having wandered into a gap that he nicknamed Howling Valley because of the hundreds of wolves that could be heard caterwauling there. It was only about eighteen miles away on foot. “It’s so easy to get at; that’s the beauty of it,” Muir declared, ticking off the varieties of big game whose tracks he’d seen there: bears, wolves, caribou, mountain goats. “When ye’re there, all ye have to do is hunt.” With the summer solstice fast approaching, hours of daylight remained after dinner. Harriman immediately dispatched seven packers with camping gear, then followed closely behind with five other hunters, including Grinnell and Merriam. All of them carried Winchester rifles.
There is something irresistible about watching the face of a calving tidewater glacier, the anticipation of beautiful violence. Gazing at Muir Glacier, Frederick Dellenbaugh was mesmerized by “the way the great masses seem to hesitate a moment or two in the air” before plunging into the water below. The wonders of Glacier Bay seem to have left even Burroughs, known for his ability to effortlessly churn out reams of prose, momentarily stymied; he recounted that “we were in the midst of strange scenes, hard to render in words.” All night, as the passengers slept aboard the Elder, they were intermittently awakened by the cracks and roars of calving ice and rocked by the waves that followed.
Muir had yet to resolve his feelings toward Harriman after two weeks in his company. He was suspicious of his fortune and contemptuous of his desire to shoot a bear. Muir never carried a gun on his adventures and, though he ate meat, he disapproved strongly of killing for sport. Near the end of the 1879 trip, when everyone was hungry, Hall Young asked Toyatte why he and his men hadn’t shot any ducks. “Because the duck’s friend would not let us,” the chief replied. “When we want to shoot, Mr. Muir always shakes the canoe.” Twenty years later, his feelings had only deepened. He described the shooting of a deer by one local in Sitka like a double homicide: The man had “murdered a mother deer and threw her over the ridgepole of his shanty, then caught her pitiful baby fawn and tied it beneath her dead mother.”
Harriman was proving to be more difficult to pigeonhole than the trigger-happy hunters Muir despised. As the Elder departed Juneau, Harriman spotted a skinny stray dog that had wandered onto the ship. When he learned that the pooch had come aboard following one of the crew, Harriman sought out the sailor and informed him firmly that he was responsible for keeping his friend well fed until he could be taken back to Juneau on their return south. “As long as this dog is on board, he is our guest,” Harriman said.
As the doting father of two daughters back in California, Muir also admired Harriman’s hands-on parenting. Here was a man who could be seen racing his young sons around the deck of the Elder and took joy in marching alongside the youngest, three-year-old Roland, as he pulled a toy canoe on a string. The Harriman daughters were curious and eager to get their feet dirty (once they’d lifted their long skirts) and assist with scientific work. As their father tramped off into the mountains in pursuit of bear, Muir led Mary and Cornelia Harriman, their cousin Elizabeth Averell, and friend Dorothea Draper—a group he had dubbed “the Big Four”—on a three-mile hike across the glacier named for him.
Muir seems to have left out a few important details from his account of Howling Valley’s big-game potential, such as how his trek there had ended with him snow-blind, stumbling into a pool of meltwater over his head and shivering naked through the night in his sleeping bag. Harriman’s bear-hunting party walked up and down over the slippery glacier until 11:00 P.M., slept lightly, and started again at 4:00 A.M. The second day, “we trudged slowly over ice in a drenching rain,” Merriam recorded in his journal. This was a prelude to a long march through knee-deep wet snow. The experienced scout Yellowstone Kelly,* who’d spent the prior summer in Alaska, took stock of conditions and dropped out. Urged on by Harriman, team members roped themselves together to forge ahead across several snow-filled crevasses. When they finally gazed down into Howling Valley, Merriam wrote, “we not only saw no signs of life, but not a single track.” The hunt was abandoned.
One bit of drama remained near the end of the party’s twenty-four-mile slog back to camp. As they arrived, a sequence of icebergs began cracking from the face of Muir Glacier, the salvo escalating until most of the ice wall seemed to be crashing into the sea. Merriam watched in wonder as the tremendous splash birthed a wave a hundred feet high—“one of the most impressive things I ever saw.” His excitement turned to fear when he realized that the photographers Curtis and Inverarity were rowing a small canvas canoe directly in the path of the giant wave. The two were experienced with small craft in rough seas, and they paddled furiously into the face of the oncoming wave. As their fellow expeditioners held their breath, the two men rode up and over to safety.
All the Howling Valley hunters returned in bad shape, but Merriam seems to have suffered the most, crippled by an arthritic knee and a bruised foot that would lay him up in bed the next day. Muir was among those who went out to assist him back to camp. His sympathy may have been motivated by guilt. John Burroughs observed later that “there might not be any bears in Howling Valley after all—Muir’s imagination may have done all the howling.”
To men who had never before witnessed the power of glaciers, the entire land around Glacier Bay seemed to be in transition. “We saw the world-shaping forces at work,” Burroughs wrote of the debris that glaciers had unearthed. The smooth and rounded rocks deposited by the glacier’s retreat “had evidently passed as it were through the gizzard of the huge monster,” leaving behind the mineralogical raw ingredients for future forests. Accustomed to the eastern landscape, shaped by glaciers thousands of years ago, Burroughs marveled at the opportunity to scramble “over plains they had built yesterday.” A group of bird specialists spent three days collecting specimens on Gustavus Peninsula, a long, flat stretch of land formed from glacial deposits that appeared to be “not much over a century old.” (William Dall named the new peninsula after the king of Sweden in 1878.) The spot was now wooded enough to host more than forty species of birds.
Perhaps most striking was the shrinkage of the glaciers themselves. Muir Glacier had lost four miles of ice in the twenty years since its namesake had first laid eyes on it. At the head of the bay, the Grand Pacific Glacier had retreated far enough onto land that its ice had separated into three individual glaciers.