No matter which state you are in there will always be an outdoor wilderness experience you can purchase. The most prevalent ones are probably whitewater rafting and ziplines, but there are numerous guided trips that are offered. Glacier Bay National Park is no different. The Alsek River’s terminus in the north side of the park  can only be experienced by guided rafting trips. Anytime a cruise vessel enters the park, they are required to pick up a park Ranger. The Ranger is specifically there to make sure the vessel follows all park guidelines, and to give accurate information about the park. For instance, Marble Islands is a hot spot for bird activity, various Alcids including Tufted Puffins will nest there. Any vessel entering the park must spend at least 15 minutes there viewing and the Stellar Sea Lions who haul out on the rocks. Each vessel must also spend at least 30 minutes at a Tidewater Glacier. I was shocked to find out how much control Glacier Bay has on the experience each visitor has, and the power dynamic they keep regarding what people can see.

Richmond m. Eustis jr. is the author of “Buying the Wilderness Experience: The Commodification of the Sublime”, a postgraduate article published in the International Postgraduate Journal of Philosophy. In his thesis, Richmond examines “some of the implications of guided wilderness trips against the theoretical framework of the sublime as Kant sets out in the Critique of Judgment. In particular, it focuses on the role of professional guides as providers of distancing protection from wild and dangerous nature—at the same time as they attempt to facilitate a possible awe-inspiring encounter with nature in its wild otherness” (Eustis 22). This is exactly the atmosphere Glacier Bay is creating with guided Ranger trips.

Before we dive deeper into the problems this may create, I want to take a minute and highlight the solutions this solves as well. For one, having a Ranger onboard will help mitigate bad experiences with marine life (bad for marine life) by making sure the vessel operates by the Glacier Bay regulations. The regulations for viewing Humpback whales, for example, is that the vessel must actively navigate away from them. This potentially will help combat vessel and whale collision. The vessel is more likely to follow those regulations with a Ranger onboard watching and relaying information to Park Supervisors, keeping the park pristine as it advertises.

“Taking to the wilderness with a guide makes sense for several reasons. First, it’s worthwhile to go with someone who knows the region, can indicate and discuss the local plants, wildlife and geology, and can minimize the risk of getting injured or lost. The guide has knowledge and skills valuable in the wild that, presumably, the guide’s clients lack. These might include orienteering, backcountry camping technique, the ability to identify safe food and water, wilderness medicine, even specialized skills like high-angle rescue. Second: the guides are not the only advantage one secures when hiring them.  Rather, the client taps into the power of an entire structure of capital that makes the guide possible—the entire outdoor industry. There is, then, an enormous guarantee of one’s security when embarking on a wilderness excursion with a hired professional guide. The guide becomes the personified representative of the industry itself, backed by access to gear and knowledge his clients lack” (Eustis 31).

As cities crawl there way over landscape after landscape, a demand for uninhabited wilderness increases, though most Urbanites lack the skill to navigate the demands of that wilderness, the demand for the experience creates a supply market for guides and outfitters. Its estimated the industry will generate around 289 billion annually in revenue.

Glacier Bay and Alaska are visited every summer by these urbanites. Usually here to experience wild places that are unparalleled in their home states. Most of the state boasts that tourism is their number one economic generator, and guided expeditions make up a bulk of those monies. In Alaska, you can get a guide for fishing, hiking, hunting, ziplining, rafting, kayaking, guided bus tours, dog mushing, helicopter tours, whale viewing, and just about any other outdoor adventure you can think of. These guides are trying to give you the most sublime wilderness experience of your life.  The real challenge for a guide is making you see past the mountain, or sea, or glaciers. The guides need you to see more than just ice walls and dark seas, they need you to see sublimity.

“True sublimity must be sought only in the mind of the judging person, not in the natural object the judging of which prompts this mental attunement. Indeed, who would want to call sublime such things as shapeless mountain masses piled on one another in wild disarray, with their pyramids of ice, or the gloomy raging sea? But the mind feels elevated in its own judgment of itself when it contemplates these without concern for their form and abandons itself to the imagination and to a reason that has come to be connected with it—though quite without a determinate purpose, and merely expanding it—and finds all the might of the imagination still inadequate to reason’s ideas” (Kant, 256).

This idea is echoed in Glacier Bay. As a vessel pulls alongside Marble Island, the Ranger gives her presentation about the birds you will see nesting on the rock mounds. It is not sublime to look at a bunch of birds going about their lives, what is sublime is the human mind placing feelings and anthropomorphizing those birds. After the Ranger gives their speech you now know how long those birds have had to migrate, what kind of mate they are looking for, what the bird’s eggs will look like, and all the challenges they face to raise those chicks. So, when you see that magnificent Tufted Puffin you know it mates for life, that it eats sand lance and small pollock, and that its migration south is long and arduous; this is the sublime.

Sublime landscapes must provoke fear without being afraid. As Richmond Eustis put it “To provoke fear in the onlooker is to provoke an interest—specifically the interest of getting away and never again being in such a situation. To be truly sublime, there must be fearfulness without fear. But without the ability to provoke fear in the onlooker, the sublime cannot occur” (Eustis 25). There is no better definition for guiding in Alaska than that. When our vessel pulls up to Margie Glacier, an actively caving glacier in Glacier Bay, there is no fear of the glacier as the guest are safe a warm on the vessel. Still, Margie Glacier is fearful. The rumbling deep sound of massive ice banging together echoes around the cove, ice towers the size of mountains break off into the water, tidal waves make the boat roll back and forth, and the dramatic freshly craved rock is laid bare to showcase the true power of glaciers. Seeing a glacier from a vessel 150 feet in length epitomizes fear without fear. The human mind can imagine what it must be like trapped inside a glacier without ever facing any sort of life threating danger.

As a guide, you know the real dangers of wilderness. Guides know that bears visit the same salmon producing streams you will be fishing on. Guides know that the water in Alaska is cold and unforgiven. Guides know the dangers lurking in the forest aren’t necessarily bears but Moose. So why do people want to experience this wilderness? I believe it’s a simple answer. People want to be held in check with how small and meaningless they really are in the world. In the wilderness of Alaska, an inexperienced person could easily become hurt or die doing the smallest of tasks, but there is a sense of respect and self-reliance that comes from being there. You want to know that the universe is bigger than yourself, and you also want to know that you can make it. There is a good chance that you will not feel the sublime trucking it by yourself, therefore guides are hired. People want the right amount of danger, self-reliance, and safety to make an experience sublime.

“After all, the company and the guide together hope to orchestrate a sense of the sublime in their clients. In order to be successful, the guide must tread a very fine line between the perception of safety and danger.  Too much danger, and the sublime is impossible, as the client spends too much time uncomfortable or terrified, unable to reflect on the sublime the scene might have provoked in other circumstances” (Eustis 33).

If the experience is too safe, then it’s not adventurous enough. If the experience is to dangerous, then you don’t want to recall the experience. One of the most important lessons any guide learns, and one Glacier Bay uses as well is the lesson that “wilderness guides are not manipulating wilderness. They are manipulating people—how minds encounter the otherness that is the backcountry” (Eustis 35). Guides are the ultimate power holders in peoples experience with wilderness, for they also hold the power to teach people how to exist in wilderness without a guide. Guides can help preserve and foster new individuals in to conservation or environmental ethics. On the flip side, they also get to decided who and how others can experience wilderness.

It is truly a pleasure to talk with the Glacier Bay Rangers, they hold a lot of information and are open to sharing. My hope for this portfolio is that individuals can start to analyze how they interact with the natural world, and rethink the idea of wilderness and our places within it. To end this piece here is Richmond Eustis again: “The pleasure a mind takes in this sublime might stem from recognition that one lives in a world of real manifolds that seem to have wills alien to our own. It might stem from the realization not that the human mind is part of nature, but that the otherness of nature is an analogue for ourselves—and evidence, perhaps, that insomuch as we are like such crude nature we exist as more than ghosts in the machine. If the guide does the job properly, the client may learn to respect wilderness, and to navigate it on her own” (Eustis 37).