Alaska Days with John Muir

In 1879, a young missionary named Samuel Hall Young arrives at the remote outpost of Fort Wrangell, Alaska, expecting to minister to souls. Instead, he finds John Muir - already legendary, already restless - bursting through the door with maps and theories and an almost childlike hunger to climb every mountain in sight. What follows is a series of expeditions through landscapes so vast and violent and beautiful they feel less like America than like the edge of creation itself. Young chronicles their glacial crossings, their encounters with Tlingit villages, their near-death scrambles up unnamed peaks, and the gradual deepening of a friendship between a wide-eyed young man and the man who would become the father of the national parks. The wilderness transforms them both. This is adventure writing at its purest: unfiltered, occasionally dangerous, and radiant with the particular wonder of seeing a continent before it gets tamed.