A DIY trip through Alaska’s inside passage
Long before his extravagantly bearded profile appeared on postage stamps and commemorative coins, John Muir was a struggling travel writer. Muir, revered today as the founder of the Sierra Club and an early advocate for national parks, was largely unknown to America’s reading public in 1879 when he first departed San Francisco bound for Alaska’s mysterious Inside Passage, a seafaring route through the densely islanded panhandle of America’s northernmost territory.
His primary goal was to study Alaska’s glaciers; newspaper travelogues paid the bills. His adventures, guided hundreds of miles by Tlingit Indians paddling a dugout cedar canoe, became rhapsodic dispatches that found an enthusiastic audience. Within a few years, West Coast steamships were hawking Alaska sightseeing trips to the “frozen Niagara” of the Muir Glacier, a spectacular river of ice — today located in Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve — discharging massive bergs from its 300-foot-high face.
Newspaper editors might have hired Muir solely on the basis of his expense reports; he endorsed sleeping on the ground and often carried little more than bread, a notebook and a change of underwear on his long rambles. Today’s prototypical Alaska visitor, a passenger on a weeklong Inside Passage cruise, expects a significantly higher level of comfort. These cruises, which generally run $1,000 to $4,000 a passenger, usually follow the aquatic path Muir popularized, departing from Seattle or Vancouver with stops in Ketchikan, Juneau and Skagway. Two lucky cruise ships per day are permitted to enter Glacier Bay National Park and witness the icy Cinemascope glories immortalized in Muir’s classic “Travels in Alaska.” This route has become insanely popular: Last year, Alaska hosted more than 1 million cruise ship visitors, a number that continues to grow.
Muir, a spiritual rover who returned to Alaska again and again, would almost certainly not approve. More than a century