There is a note of pathos, the echo of an unfulfilled hope, in the
record of his later visit to Concord. "It was seventeen years after
our parting on Wawona ridge that I stood beside his [Emerson's] grave
under a pine tree on the hill above Sleepy Hollow. He had gone to
higher Sierras, and, as I fancied, was again waving his hand in
friendly recognition." And now John Muir has followed his friend of
other days to the "higher Sierras." His earthly remains lie among
trees planted by his own hand. To the pine tree of Sleepy Hollow
answers a guardian sequoia in the sunny Alhambra Valley.

In 1879 John Muir went to Alaska for the first time. Its stupendous
living glaciers aroused his unbounded interest, for they enabled
him to verify his theories of glacial action. Again and again he
returned to this continental laboratory of landscapes. The greatest
of the tide-water glaciers appropriately commemorates his name. Upon
this book of Alaska travels, all but finished before his unforeseen
departure, John Muir expended the last months of his life. It
was begun soon after his return from Africa in 1912. His eager
leadership of the ill-fated campaign to save his beloved Hetch-Hetchy
Valley from commercial destruction seriously interrupted his
labors. Illness, also, interposed some checks as he worked with
characteristic care and thoroughness through the great mass of Alaska
notes that had accumulated under his hands for more than thirty years.

The events recorded in this volume end in the middle of the trip of
1890. Muir's notes on the remainder of the journey have not been
found, and it is idle to speculate how he would have concluded the
volume if he had lived to complete it. But no one will read the
fascinating description of the Northern Lights without feeling a