Anyone traveling in Miller’s footsteps would understand why the legends of the indigenous Tlingit Indians pinpoint the area as the site of Creation. Great plains of ice pool among the peaks, spilling deeply crevassed glaciers from every valley. To the Tlingit the glaciers were sentient beings that writhed and pulsed through the countryside, grinding and gnawing it into a land suitable for brutal gods. One of the most capricious gods is Kah-Lituya, a sullen, toadlike spirit that lives in a cave beneath the entrance to Lituya Bay. Kah-Lituya keeps a giant brown bear as his slave, and when angered, he orders it to seize the bay in its powerful jaws and shake it, creating giant waves. Studies by Miller and other geologists have verified the Tlingit interpretation of the coast’s geologic activity; their research shows that for millennia the glaciers have advanced and receded, carving the land into its given shape over aeons of successive ice ages. Lituya Bay also sits directly atop the Fairweather Fault, a 180-mile-long fracture in the earth’s crust that geologists describe as a “strike-slip fault with lateral movement”— meaning that in Kah-Lituya’s domain the entire North American continent grinds slowly along the plate underlying the Pacific, with results that can be catastrophic. In 1958 an earthquake measuring 8.3 in magnitude caused a mammoth rock slide to cascade into Lituya Bay, generating a wave that was the highest ever recorded on the planet. The tsunami surged 1,720 feet above sea level and scoured the mountain down to bedrock.* Incredibly, one of the three fishing boats anchored in the bay survived. This was one of several mega-tsunamis generated by Kah-Lituya’s slave over the past 150 years.