THE STIKINE RIVER
Wrangell owes its existence to the nearby Stikine River, which flows from the mountains of British Columbia and ends a few miles north of town. The Stikine Tlingit who inhabited Wrangell Island for centuries used the river to fish and to trade with peoples from the interior. Petroglyph Beach, just outside Wrangell, has rock carvings that may indicate habitation in the area going back eight thousand years. The Russians built a fort here that they later leased to Britain’s Hudson’s Bay Company. After the United States took over in 1867, Wrangell was the base of operations for a minor gold rush that sent panners and miners up the Stikine to Canada’s Cassiar District. By the time the Elder sailed through, the gold bugs had moved on to Juneau and the Klondike.
Not long after arriving in Wrangell in 1879, Muir joined Hall Young and his fellow missionaries for a steamer trip up the Stikine. It would be Muir’s first major encounter with Alaska’s glaciers. For a decade, the uncredentialed alpine scholar-gypsy had been carrying on a battle with California’s state geologist, Josiah Whitney, over the formation of Yosemite Valley. Whitney, for whom California’s tallest peak had been named, believed that the floor of the valley had collapsed in a single catastrophic event. Muir, who had discovered glaciers still at work in the heights of the Sierras, insisted that the valley had been scraped out by a much more deliberate process. Muir’s glacial hypothesis combined cutting-edge science with spirituality, historian Stephen Fox explains, as it “suggested a cosmic plan” showing that God was working from a divine blueprint. Whitney wasn’t buying any of it. He referred to Muir as “that shepherd.”
Muir was struck by the beauty of the Grand Canyon of the Stikine and—taking up a theme he would return to again and again—its similarities to his beloved Northern California. “The majestic cliffs and mountains forming the cañon-walls display endless variety of form and sculpture, and are wonderfully adorned and enlivened with glaciers and waterfalls, while throughout almost its whole extent the floor is a flowery landscape garden like Yosemite,” he wrote.
It was the glaciers that impressed him most—their size, their number, the variety in their personalities. Alaska’s rivers of ice were unlike anything Muir had seen in the Sierras. Some loomed like hulking monoliths, others curved gracefully through the evergreens. Standing before the face of the Big Stickeen Glacier—now Canada’s Great Glacier—he marveled at “the sunbeams streaming through the ice pinnacles along its terminal wall” and “the broad, sparkling crystal prairie” extending into the distance.
A few weeks later, some of the Wrangell missionaries chartered a steamship to go up the coast in hopes of meeting with a clan of Tlingit. Muir saw a chance to explore the ice firsthand. At one stop, he and Young managed to climb “a mile or two,” through a “maze of shallow caves and crevasses,” into what seemed to be a glacier’s beating heart. The missionaries, overwhelmed by the grandeur of one ice-filled fjord, peppered Muir with questions about the glaciers’ physical properties. How deep was the ice? How had it formed? How old was it? Muir jotted scientific observations in his notebook as he was struck by “the peculiar awe one experiences in entering these mansions of the icy north . . . the natural effect of appreciating the manifestations of the presence of God.”
The earth was being sculpted according to God’s plans. In the Sierras, God’s glacial work was nearly complete. In Alaska, it was “still the morning of creation.”
Eager, like Muir, to see my first Alaskan glacier, I booked a jet-boat trip up the Stikine as far as the Canadian border. My guide was Eric Yancey. Also along for the ride were a father and son from Texas who’d come to Wrangell to kill a black bear. (Thus disproving Kenny the tattooed fisherman’s theory about local wildlife population control.) They didn’t talk much, perhaps because their mouths were occupied chewing tobacco and drooling into Coke cans.
Eric had started running jet-boat charters while working the swing shift at the local sawmill. “In the 1990s, the logging business sort of sputtered out,” he said; this was the same downturn that had killed Ketchikan’s timber industry. FOR SALE signs went up on homes and businesses all over town. “A lot of people left, maybe eight hundred,” which would be about a quarter of the population. “You could get money from the government for job retraining, but by that time I’d started this business.”
Eric was what might qualify as an Alaskan moderate in terms of the environment: a believer in what he called “the right mix” of wilderness and resources. Unlike most people I met in Wrangell, he knew a lot about John Muir and couldn’t understand why the town didn’t do more to promote its history with him. “If this were Juneau, they’d make a huge deal out of the Muir connection,” he said, pointing to a rocky piece of shore. “There’s a great photo of him standing in that exact spot right there.” Eric had what he admitted was “a classic ‘not in my backyard’” attitude about exploiting Alaska’s natural resources. “I’m a resources guy. I’m in favor of mining and logging,” he said with a smile. “I just prefer they don’t do it on this river.”
The day had threatened to be an ugly one, but the area wildlife seemed to be enjoying the sun while it lasted. We idled at the end of one island where thirty or more bald eagles were loitering, and saw a group of harbor seals lounging on a sandbar. We stopped at a small wooded island to pick up some kayakers who were going fishing up the river. The Texans, who were going fishing the next day, nodded and spit in unison to show their approval.
We crossed the shallow, braided waters of the Stikine’s delta and began to see signs of the wilderness that had attracted Muir. Snow dusted the tops of mountains on each side of the river, and waterfalls poured down from the heights. A moose and two calves slipped and slid as they climbed a muddy riverbank. We dropped the kayakers at the Canadian border, demarcated by a wide gap cut in the spruce forest. “Legally, you’re not supposed to cross without permission,” Eric said, reading everyone’s mind and ostentatiously turning away. “But I don’t suppose they’re watching too closely today.” Anyone who wanted to relieve himself or violate international law had five minutes to do so privately.
Safely back inside the United States of America, we entered a deep canyon. The gray rock walls were like elephant hides, striated in some places, scoured in others, evidence of long-ago ice grinding. Ten thousand years ago, when people may have been migrating across the Bering Land Bridge, the glacier in this canyon had been a mile deep. “Those sharp mountaintops you see are the only peaks that were above the ice,” Eric said. “Anything rounded was under the ice.” Muir noted that the views along the Stikine changed with “bewildering rapidity” and, in one early travel dispatch, called the Stikine “a Yosemite one hundred miles long.” This section in particular could have been an Ansel Adams slide show. I asked Eric about the hundred or so glaciers that had so captivated Muir, and he agreed that they were in steady retreat. Some were gone. Several hanging glaciers, isolated ones that cling to mountainsides at higher elevations, have disappeared in the past twenty years. He suggested we pay a visit to Chief Shakes Glacier, which was a tidewater glacier, meaning one long enough to flow from the mountains into the sea.
We followed an inlet through a narrow canyon that widened into a lake. The water was clogged with icebergs of various sizes, some of which glowed blue like berry Slurpees. “I’ve seen bergs half the size of downtown Wrangell in here,” Eric said, maneuvering the jet boat around obstacles. “Sometimes it’s so full of ice chunks, you can’t get through unless you really work at it.” At the far end of the lake was the frozen wall of Chief Shakes Glacier, which wound backward like a wide dirt path into the mountains.
Muir hadn’t seen any of this in 1879, because it didn’t exist. What was now Shakes Lake had been ice. “Actually, the glacier was out this far the first time I was out here in ’92,” Eric said. “It’s receded a mile and a half in that time.”
We cruised toward the glacier’s majestic face, the jet boat’s metal hull clanging against blocks of ice. Up close, the sixty-foot-high ice wall looked haggard and unhealthy, the molars of a beast with a fondness for candy and an aversion to flossing. Chunks of ice were calving off frequently enough that we maintained a safe distance. “I don’t know where you fall on this subject,” Eric said after a block the size of a mobile home plunged into the water, “but I think the weather’s just getting warmer. Ice melts, the air gets warmer, more ice melts; and it creates a self-fulfilling cycle. I’m sure humans haven’t helped, but are we really gonna give up our big vehicles and flying around the world on vacations?”
When he put it that way, sacrificing comfort seemed almost unpatriotic. I departed Wrangell the next day on the MV Columbia, the largest and probably nicest ferry in the Alaska fleet. Edward Harriman himself would have appreciated my accommodations: a four-person room with a shower.