"Before the reader turns his back upon the Grand Basin once for all, I should like to put a name upon the glacier it contains - since it is the fashion to name glaciers"
About this Quote
A lone, wry pause interrupts the forward rush of an Arctic narrative: before we move on, let us affix a name. The aside feels half-apologetic, half-playful, as if the writer sees the vanity in explorers christening every icefall and ridge yet cannot resist the impulse to leave a verbal cairn for those who follow. The phrase "since it is the fashion to name glaciers" carries a quiet irony; it acknowledges the performative nature of naming while also asserting a storyteller’s prerogative to shape the map through language.
Hudson Stuck wrote from the high world of Denali, recounting the 1913 ascent he led and the features encountered along the way. The Grand Basin is the vast, wind-hollowed chamber of snow and ice high on the mountain, a place where scale and silence dwarf human presence. He pauses there to name the glacier within, a gesture that does more than satisfy fashion. In The Ascent of Denali he proposed the name Harper Glacier, honoring Walter Harper, the young Athabaskan-Irish climber who was first to step onto the summit that day. What might have been a perfunctory act of possession becomes an act of remembrance, binding geography to the courage and skill of a specific person.
The moment also reflects Stuck’s more complicated stance toward names. He famously advocated returning the mountain’s Native name, Denali, resisting the trend of attaching distant politicians to landscapes they never saw. Yet he still partakes in the naming ritual; the difference is whom he chooses to honor and why. By inscribing Harper’s name into the ice, he elevates a partner often overlooked in heroic narratives and counters the erasure that naming so frequently enables.
So the line works on several levels: a nod to convention, a sly critique of it, and a deliberate attempt to fix a human story in a realm where wind and snow quickly wipe footprints away.
Hudson Stuck wrote from the high world of Denali, recounting the 1913 ascent he led and the features encountered along the way. The Grand Basin is the vast, wind-hollowed chamber of snow and ice high on the mountain, a place where scale and silence dwarf human presence. He pauses there to name the glacier within, a gesture that does more than satisfy fashion. In The Ascent of Denali he proposed the name Harper Glacier, honoring Walter Harper, the young Athabaskan-Irish climber who was first to step onto the summit that day. What might have been a perfunctory act of possession becomes an act of remembrance, binding geography to the courage and skill of a specific person.
The moment also reflects Stuck’s more complicated stance toward names. He famously advocated returning the mountain’s Native name, Denali, resisting the trend of attaching distant politicians to landscapes they never saw. Yet he still partakes in the naming ritual; the difference is whom he chooses to honor and why. By inscribing Harper’s name into the ice, he elevates a partner often overlooked in heroic narratives and counters the erasure that naming so frequently enables.
So the line works on several levels: a nod to convention, a sly critique of it, and a deliberate attempt to fix a human story in a realm where wind and snow quickly wipe footprints away.
Quote Details
| Topic | Nature |
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