GLACIER BAY NATIONAL PARK
Our two-person kayak skimmed the surface of Glacier Bay’s glassy water, the bow pointed like a compass needle at the rocky lump of Russell Island. The sun was out, always a pleasant surprise in Southeast Alaska, and a light mist lingered around the island’s upper half. We’d been paddling for about an hour, but I had no idea how far we’d come or how far we had left to go. My sense of scale hadn’t yet acclimated to the vastness we’d entered—water, sky, and mountains were all I had to work with. Aside from the splash of our paddles and the occasional tap-tapping of sea otters cracking open mussels, all was quiet.
“Will there be anyone else on Russell Island?” I asked David Cannamore, who was seated behind me. David was a former college athlete who guided kayakers around Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve all day, every day during the summer. He paddled with the metronomic grace of a professional tennis player volleying against a ball machine and accounted for perhaps 80 percent of our forward progress.
“I seriously doubt it,” David said. “I’ve camped a lot of places in this park, but never on Russell Island. There probably aren’t even any bears there.”
Bears were just one subject I’d never given much thought to back in New York City that seemed to come up again and again in Alaska. Others included the five varieties of Pacific salmon, the structural integrity of permafrost, recipes for moose meat, the declining quality of rubber boots, and a simmering resentment toward Washington, DC, that fell under the general rubric of “federal overreach.” Glaciers were another popular topic. As David and I paddled across the silent immensity of Glacier Bay, we were surrounded on all sides by the park’s namesake rivers of ice flowing down from the mountains. Their frozen innards glowed a phosphorescent blue that eclipsed the cloudless sky above. A few times every hour, the giants discharged ice from their wrinkled faces—crack, rumble, splash—one of nature’s most spellbinding performances.
According to the slightly damp map I kept pulling out of a pocket beneath my life vest, the glaciers of Glacier Bay were doing something else, too. They were melting, and had been doing so for some time. There was no better evidence of this than Russell Island. In 1879, the then unknown conservationist John Muir had first scouted the bay in a dugout canoe guided by Tlingit Indians. Russell Island marked the furthest reach of his journey, for it was embedded in two hundred feet of solid ice, a pebble crushed beneath the leading edge of a glacier that flowed back up beyond the horizon into Canada. For the next twenty years, Muir returned repeatedly to Glacier Bay and its ever-changing landscape. On his seventh and final visit, in 1899, Muir estimated that the ice wall had retreated four miles. Russell Island was surrounded by open water.
Wavy lines on my map, each labeled with a year, demarcated the former extent of Glacier Bay’s namesake ice in decades past. These were the shrinking borders of an empire under siege, evidence that in the century following John Muir’s visits, the frozen kingdom whose praises he’d sung had been dissolving like a popsicle in the sun. Muir Glacier, named to honor the writer who literally put Glacier Bay on the map and almost singlehandedly created the market for scenic Alaska cruises, had withdrawn more than twenty miles since 1879.
For many people, especially environmentalists who revere John Muir as a nature prophet, this glacial retreat is obvious evidence of global warming. Which makes sense until you stop to ask why the ice had begun melting before the gasoline-powered automobile was invented. In some places along Alaska’s coast, including Glacier Bay, one can find glaciers that are growing. More than a century after Muir’s investigations, a lot of things were behaving unpredictably in Alaska, not just the glaciers but also animals, plants, weather, and—considering my sudden desire to go kayaking and camping in America’s most remote wilderness—me.
Small white bergs drifted past as we paddled, reminders that the tranquil water beneath us could chill the life out of you in a few minutes. I’d already heard plenty of stories about outdoor adventures in Alaska that had quickly turned into outdoor tragedies. A group of six fishermen casting these same frigid waters not far from shore a few weeks earlier had leaned over to admire a catch and overturned their boat. The four who survived the cold shock were hypothermic when rescued. You didn’t turn your back on Alaska.
From a distance, Russell Island had looked like a good place for a prison colony. When David and I landed, we found a perfect deserted isle with a panoramic view: two rows of dark mountains tapering toward a massive white block of ice. We set up camp in a patch of tall grass above the beach. David cooked a simple dinner, careful to keep even the tiniest scrap of food a hundred yards away from our tents in case any hungry bears came through. He’d grown up in Alaska and had encountered plenty of bears, and he didn’t seem too concerned about the megafauna threat level on Russell Island. He’d seen none of the usual signs of bear activity: claw marks, scat, the large divots they dig out to sleep in.
“If you get up before the morning’s first cruise ship comes through, have a good look around,” David told me before we crawled into our tents for the night. “At that hour there probably won’t be anyone but us for twenty miles in any direction.”
Sunlight spilled into the fjord just after 4:00 A.M.—daybreak in Southeast Alaska in June—and illuminated the glacier at the head of the bay. When my great-great-grandparents were holding hands as teenagers, that ice had engulfed the spot where I stood. I sat on a rock that had been deposited by the glacier’s hasty retreat sometime between John Muir’s first visit, in 1879, and his last, in 1899, pulled out my map, and tried once again to untangle the changes that had taken place in that span.
When I looked up, I saw immediately that David’s observation about our morning solitude needed a clarification. We were definitely the only humans on Russell Island, and probably the only people for many miles in any direction. But we weren’t exactly alone.