We made port in Juneau, Alaska. I knew we must be approaching a "big" city (Juneau has a population of 30,000) because the vast stretches of wilderness gave way to float planes flying overhead every few minutes. At last the city stretched out before us, the jagged steep mountains rising up from all sides. It is unreachable by road, and you must visit it by sea or by air.

From Juneau we traveled to the Mendenhall Glacier, which lies in the beautiful Tongass National Forest, a vast forest covering much of southeast Alaska. The Tongass is the biggest national forest in the U.S. The glacier flows from the Juneau Icefield, and spills out into a lake at the foot of the glacier. The cold wind blew down from the ice, and large icebergs floated in the water, which ran thick with rock flour.

John Muir was here in the late 1880s...I like to think of what he saw back then, with the glaciers much more vast than they are now.