By the late 1940s, Ansel Adams had already photographed many of the landscapes that would become synonymous with his name: Yosemite Valley, the Sierra Nevada, the Southwest, and the great national parks of the American West. In 1941, Ansel had been hired by the United States Department of the Interior to create a series of mural-sized photographs of America’s national parks and monuments. The project was conceived as a celebration of our protected landscapes: an ambitious tour of the places set aside for public enjoyment and preservation. Sadly, the country’s entry into World War II halted the project before it could be completed.
Ansel did not let the idea die, and in 1946, he received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, a generous grant which gave him the ability to continue the mural project. Renewed in 1948, the fellowship helped carry him farther than he and his camera had ventured before, visiting Alaska and Hawaii to photograph glaciers, volcanic islands, and tropical gardens.
Buddhist Grave Markers and Rainbow
Maui, Hawaii
Original Photograph
Ansel Adams
1956
These journeys expanded Ansel’s understanding of what the American landscape could contain.
In 1947, he traveled to Alaska with his son Michael, eager to photograph some of the world’s most isolated and unspoiled natural places. The journey itself was arduous and long: Michael later recalled that they drove to Seattle, took a steamship through the Inside Passage to Juneau (stopping at towns, villages, and fish canneries along the way), then flew to Anchorage and continued by train to Mount McKinley National Park. The place overwhelmed him. As Ansel wrote to his friends Nancy and Beaumont Newhall, “I am full of fresh air, spray on the take-off, noise, but simply unbelievable scenery. I am afraid Alaska is the Place for me! I am NUTS about it.”
The highlight of his trip was a visit to Mount McKinley, now known as Denali. It was, and remains, a landscape of extraordinary scale: a peak so immense that it creates its own weather, so often hidden by haze and cloud that patience becomes as necessary as technical skill. Adams and Michael stayed near Wonder Lake, waiting for the mountain to reveal itself. At about 1:30 in the morning, the summit began to catch the color of the light, slowly emerging from the gathering clouds. The resulting photograph is one of Adams’ greatest images of the northern wilderness, revealing the stark contrast between the remote peak and the still, dark lake below it.
Alaska offered Adams something different from the Sierra Nevada. It was vaster, colder, and less predictable than the Yosemite landscapes he knew well. In photographs such as Teklanika River and Trailside, Near Juneau, one sees Adams responding to a wilderness at once monumental and intimate: braided rivers, mountain slopes, low vegetation, and paths cut through an immense northern landscape.
Hawaii presented an entirely different challenge.
Teklanika River
Mt. Denali National Park, Alaska
Original Photograph
Ansel Adams
1947
Roots, Foster Gardens
Honolulu, Hawaii
Original Photograph
Ansel Adams
1948
There, Adams encountered national park landscapes shaped not by glaciers and alpine weather, but by volcanic force, tropical growth, and island light. In the late 1940s, his work brought him to Hawaii National Park, then encompassing Haleakala on Maui and Hawaii Volcanoes on the Island of Hawaii. These landscapes marked by craters, rocks, lava, dense vegetation, and snarling roots offered forms very different from the snowy summits and open valleys most often showcased in his work. The photographs Adams made in Hawaii reveal another side of his vision. Rather than relying only on grand distance, he often turned toward compressed spaces, finding sculptural detail in organic forms. In Roots, Foster Gardens, Honolulu, Hawaii, the camera lingers on the exposed roots of a banyan tree, transforming living growth into a study of line, movement, and form. In Vine and Rock, Island of Hawaii, T.H., the meeting of plant and stone becomes nearly abstract, suggesting the vastness of geological time.
Together, the Alaska and Hawaii photographs show Adams extending the language of his art into unfamiliar terrain. The Guggenheim project did not simply send him in search of beautiful places—it asked him to imagine the national parks and monuments as a constellation of landscapes, like the country they stood in, offering a vast range of climates, histories, and moods.
Seen today, these photographs remind us that Adams’ national park work was never confined to just one landscape. The Guggenheim journeys allowed him to pursue a broader vision: a photographic portrait of American wilderness in its astonishing variety. At the edges of the map, Adams found new ways to see the country he had spent his life documenting.
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Last Updated on August 25, 2026
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Ansel Adams with Workshop Class in Upper Studio, Best's Studio, Yosemite, photograph by George Smith, ca.1942. Photograph courtesy of the Adams Family Archives.
Milestone Mountain, original gelatin silver photograph by Ansel Adams
