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I LEFT San Francisco for
Glacier Bay on the steamer City of Pueblo, June 14, 1890, at 10 A.M., this
being my third trip to southeastern Alaska and fourth to Alaska, including
northern and western Alaska as far as Unalaska and Point Barrow and the
northeastern coast of Siberia. The bar at the Golden Gate was smooth, the
weather cool and pleasant. The redwoods in sheltered coves approach the
shore closely, their dwarfed and shorn tops appearing here and there in
ravines along the coast up to Oregon. The wind-swept hills, beaten with
scud, are of course bare of trees. Along the Oregon and Washington coast the
trees get nearer the sea, for spruce and contorted pine endure the briny
winds better than the redwoods. We took the inside passage between the shore
and Race Rocks, a long range of islets on which many a good ship has been
wrecked. The breakers from the deep Pacific, driven by the gale, made a
glorious display of foam on the bald islet rocks, sending spray over the
tops of some of them a hundred feet high or more in sublime, curving,
jagged-edged and flame shaped sheets. The gestures of these upspringing,
purple-tinged waves as they dashed and broke were sublime and serene,
combining displays of graceful beauty of motion and form with tremendous
power — a truly glorious show. I noticed several small villages on the green
slopes between the timbered mountains and the shore. Long Beach made quite a
display of new houses along the beach, north of the mouth of the Columbia.
I had pleasant company on the
Pueblo and sat at the chief engineer's table, who was a good and merry
talker. An old San Francisco lawyer, rather stiff and dignified, knew my
father-in-law, Dr. Strentzel. Three ladies, opposed to the pitching of the
ship, were absent from table the greater part of the way. My best talker was
an old Scandinavian sea-captain, who was having a new bark built at Port
Blakely, — an interesting old salt, every sentence of his conversation
flavored with sea-brine, bluff and hearty as a sea-wave, keen-eyed,
courageous, self-reliant, and so stubbornly skeptical he refused to believe
even in glaciers.
"After you see your bark," I
said, "and find everything being done to your mind, you had better go on to
Alaska and see the glaciers."
"Oh, I haf seen many glaciers
already."
"But are you sure that you
know what a glacier is?" I asked.
"Vell, a glacier is a big
mountain all covered up vith ice."
"Then a river," said I, "must
be a big mountain all covered with water."
I explained what a glacier
was and succeeded in exciting his interest. I told him he must reform, for a
man who neither believed in God nor glaciers must be very bad, indeed the
worst of all unbelievers.
At Port Townsend I met Mr.
Loomis, who had agreed to go with me as far as the Muir Glacier. We sailed
from here on the steamer Queen. We touched again at Victoria, and I took a
short walk into the adjacent woods and gardens and found the flowery
vegetation in its glory, especially the large wild rose for which the region
is famous, and the spirma and English honeysuckle of the gardens.
June 18. We sailed from
Victoria on the Queen at 10.30 A.M. The weather all the way to Fort Wrangell
was cloudy and rainy, but the scenery is delightful even in the dullest
weather. The marvelous wealth of forests, islands, and waterfalls, the
cloud-wreathed heights, the many avalanche slopes and slips, the pearl-gray
tones of the sky, the browns of the woods, their purple flower edges and
mist fringes, the endless combinations of water and land and ever-shifting
clouds — none of these greatly interest the tourists. I noticed one of the
small whales that frequent these channels and mentioned the fact, then
called attention to a charming group of islands, but they turned their eyes
from the islands, saying, "Yes, yes, they are very fine, but where did you
see the whale?"
The timber is larger and
apparently better every way as you go north from Victoria, that is on the
islands, perhaps on account of fires from less rain to the southward. All
the islands have been overswept by the ice-sheet and are but little changed
as yet, save a few of the highest summits which have been sculptured by
local residual glaciers. All have approximately the form of greatest
strength with reference to the overflow of an ice-sheet, excepting those
mentioned above, which have been more or less eroded by local residual
glaciers. Every channel also has the form of greatest strength with
reference to ice-action. Islands, as we have seen, are still being born in
Glacier Bay and elsewhere to the northward.
I found many pleasant people
aboard, but strangely ignorant on the subject of earth-sculpture and
landscape-making. Professor Niles, of the Boston Institute of Technology, is
aboard; also Mr. Russell and Mr. Kerr of the Geological Survey, who are now
on their way to Mt. St. Elias, hoping to reach the summit; and a
granddaughter of Peter Burnett, the first governor of California.
We arrived at Wrangell in the
rain at 10.30 p.Ai. There was a grand rush on shore to buy curiosities and
see totem poles. The shops were jammed and mobbed, high prices paid for
shabby stuff manufactured expressly for tourist trade. Silver bracelets
hammered out of dollars and half dollars by Indian smiths are the most
popular articles, then baskets, yellow cedar toy canoes, paddles, etc. Most
people who travel look only at what they are directed to look at. Great is
the power of the guidebook-maker, however ignorant. I inquired for my old
friends Tyeen and Shakes, who were both absent.
June 20. We left Wrangell
early this morning and passed through the Wrangell Narrows at high tide. I
noticed a few bergs near Cape Fanshawe from Wrangell Glacier. The water ten
miles from Wrangell is colored with particles derived mostly from the
Stickeen River glaciers and Le Conte Glacier. All the waters of the channels
north of Wrangell are green or yellowish from glacier erosion. We had a good
view of the glaciers all the way to Juneau, but not of their high,
cloud-veiled fountains. The stranded bergs on the moraine bar at the mouth
of Sum Dum Bay looked just as they did when I first saw them ten years ago.
Before reaching Juneau, the
Queen proceeded up the Taku Inlet that the passengers might see the fine
glacier at its head, and ventured to within half a mile of the
berg-discharging front, which is about three quarters of a mile wide. Bergs
fell but seldom, perhaps one in half an hour. The glacier makes a rapid
descent near the front. The inlet, therefore, will not be much extended
beyond its present limit by the recession of the glacier. The grand rocks on
either side of its channel show ice-action in telling style. The Norris
Glacier, about two miles below the Taku, is a good example of a glacier in
the first stage of decadence. The Taku River enters the head of the inlet a
little to the east of the glaciers, coming from beyond the main coast range.
All the tourists are delighted at seeing a grand glacier in the flesh. The
scenery is very fine here and in the channel at Juneau. On Douglas Island
there is a large mill of 240 stamps, all run by one small waterwheel, which,
however, is acted on by water at enormous pressure. The forests around the
mill are being rapidly nibbled away. Wind is here said to be very violent at
times, blowing away people and houses and sweeping scud far up the
mountain-side. Winter snow is seldom more than a foot or two deep.
June 21. We arrived at
Douglas Island at five in the afternoon and went sight-seeing through the
mill. Six hundred tons of low-grade quartz are crushed per day. Juneau, on
the mainland opposite the Douglas Island mills, is quite a village, well
supplied with stores, churches, etc. A dance-house in which Indians are
supposed to show native dances of all sorts is perhaps the best-patronized
of all the places of amusement. A Mr. Brooks, who prints a paper here, gave
us some information on Mt. St. Elias, Mt. Wrangell, and the Cook Inlet and
Prince William Sound region. He told Russell that he would never reach the
summit of St. Elias, that it was inaccessible. He saw no glaciers that
discharged bergs into the sea at Cook Inlet, but many in Prince William
Sound.
June 22. Leaving Juneau at
noon, we had a good view of the Auk Glacier at the mouth of the channel
between Douglas Island and the mainland, and of Eagle Glacier a few miles
north of the Auk on the east side of Lynn Canal. Then the Davidson Glacier
came in sight, finely curved, striped with medial moraines, and girdled in
front by its magnificent tree-fringed terminal moraine; and besides these
many others of every size and pattern on the mountains bounding Lynn Canal,
most of them comparatively small, completing their sculpture. The mountains
on either hand and at the head of the canal are strikingly beautiful at any
time of the year. The sky to-day is mostly clear, with just clouds enough
hovering about the mountains to show them to best advantage as they stretch
onward in sustained grandeur like two separate and distinct ranges, each
mountain with its glaciers and clouds and fine sculpture glowing bright in
smooth, graded light. Only a few of them exceed five thousand feet in
height; but as one naturally associates great height with ice-and-snow-laden
mountains and with glacial sculpture so pronounced, they seem much higher.
There are now two canneries at the head of Lynn Canal. The Indians furnish
some of the salmon at ten cents each. Everybody sits up to see the midnight
sky. At this time of the year there is no night here, though the sun drops a
degree or two below the horizon. One may read at twelve o'clock San
Francisco time.
June 23. Early this morning
we arrived in Glacier Bay. We passed through crowds of bergs at the mouth of
the bay, though, owing to wind and tide, there were but few at the front of
Muir Glacier. A fine, bright day, the last of a group of a week or two, as
shown by the dryness of the sand along the shore and on the moraine — rare
weather hereabouts. Most of the passengers went ashore and climbed the
moraine on * the east side to get a view of the glacier from a point a
little higher than the top of the front wall. A few ventured on a mile or
two farther. The day was delightful, and our one hundred and eighty
passengers were happy, gazing at the beautiful blue of the bergs and the
shattered, pinnacled, crystal wall, awed by the thunder and commotion of the
falling and rising icebergs, which ever and anon sent spray flying several
hundred feet into the air and raised swells that set all the fleet of bergs
in motion and roared up the beach, telling the story of the birth of every
iceberg far and near. The number discharged varies much, influenced in part
no doubt by the tides and weather and seasons, sometimes one every five
minutes for half a day at a time on the average, though intervals of twenty
or thirty minutes may occur without any considerable fall, then three or
four immense discharges will take place in as many minutes. The sound they
make is like heavy thunder, with a prolonged roar after deep thudding sounds
— a perpetual thunderstorm easily heard three or four miles away. The roar
in our tent and the shaking of the ground one or two miles distant from
points of discharge seems startlingly near.
I had to look after camp-supplies and left the ship late this morning, going
with a crowd to the glacier; then, taking advantage of the fine weather, I
pushed off alone into the silent icy prairie to the east, to Nunatak Island,
about five hundred feet above the ice. I discovered a small lake on the
larger of the two islands, and many battered and ground fragments of fossil
wood, large and small. They seem to have come from trees that grew on the
island perhaps centuries ago. I mean to use this island as a station in
setting out stakes to measure the glacial flow. The top of Mt. Fairweather
is in sight at a distance of perhaps thirty miles, the ice all smooth on the
eastern border, wildly broken in the central portion. I reached the ship at
2.30 I had intended getting back at noon and sending letters and bidding
friends goodbye, but could not resist this glacier saunter. The ship moved
off as soon as I was seen on the moraine bluff, and Loomis and I waved our
hats in farewell to the many wavings of handkerchiefs of acquaintances we
had made on the trip.
Our goods — blankets,
provisions, tent, etc. -- lay in a rocky moraine hollow within a mile of the
great terminal wall of the glacier, and the discharge of the rising and
falling icebergs kept up an almost continuous thundering and echoing, while
a few gulls flew about on easy wing or stood like specks of foam on the
shore. These were our neighbors.
After my twelve-mile walk, I
ate a cracker and planned the camp. I found that one of my boxes had been
left on the steamer, but still we have more than enough of everything. We
obtained two cords of dry wood at Juneau which Captain Carroll kindly had
his men carry up the moraine to our camp-ground. We piled the wood as a
wind-break, then laid a floor of lumber brought from Seattle for a square
tent, nine feet by nine. We set the tent, stored our provisions in it, and
made our beds. This work was done by 11.30 P.M., good daylight lasting to
this time. We slept well in our roomy cotton house, dreaming of California
home nests in the wilderness of ice.
June 25. A rainy day. For a
few hours I kept count of the number of bergs discharged, then sauntered
along the beach to the end of the crystal wall. A portion of the way is
dangerous, the moraine bluff being capped by an overlying lobe of the
glacier, which as it melts sends down boulders and fragments of ice, while
the strip of sandy shore at high tide is only a few rods wide, leaving but
little room to escape from the falling moraine material and the berg-waves.
The view of the ice-cliffs, pinnacles, spires and ridges was very telling, a
magnificent picture of Nature's power and industry and love of beauty. About
a hundred or a hundred and fifty feet from the shore a large stream issues
from an arched, tunnel-like channel in the wall of the glacier, the blue of
the ice wall being of an exquisite tone, contrasting with the strange,
sooty, smoky, brown-colored stream. The front wall of the Muir Glacier is
about two and a half or three miles wide. Only the central portion about two
miles wide discharges icebergs. The two wings advanced over the washed and
stratified moraine deposits have little or no motion, melting and receding
as fast, or perhaps faster, than it advances. They have been advanced at
least a mile over the old re-formed moraines, as is shown by the overlying,
angular, recent moraine deposits, now being laid down, which are continuous
with the medial moraines of the glacier.
In the old stratified moraine
banks, trunks and branches of trees showing but little sign of decay occur
at a height of about a hundred feet above tide-water. I have not yet
compared this fossil wood with that of the opposite shore deposits. That the
glacier was once withdrawn considerably back of its present limit seems
plain. Immense torrents of water had filled in the inlet with stratified
moraine material, and for centuries favorable climatic conditions allowed
forests to grow upon it. At length the glacier advanced, probably three or
four miles, uprooting and burying the trees which had grown undisturbed for
centuries. Then came a great thaw, which produced the flood that deposited
the uprooted trees. Also the trees which grew around the shores above reach
of floods were shed off, perhaps by the thawing of the soil that was resting
on the buried margin of the glacier, left on its retreat and protected by a
covering of moraine material from melting as fast as the exposed surface of
the glacier. What appear to be remnants of the margin of the glacier when it
stood at a much higher level still exist on the left side and probably all
along its banks on both sides just below its present terminus.
June 26. We fixed a mark on
the left wing to measure the motion if any. It rained all day, but I had a
grand tramp over mud, ice, and rock to the east wall of the inlet. Brown
metamorphic slate, close-grained in places, dips away from the inlet,
presenting edges to ice-action, which has given rise to a singularly
beautiful and striking surface, polished and grooved and fluted.
All the next day it rained.
The mountains were smothered in dull-colored mist and fog, the great glacier
looming through the gloomy gray fog fringes with wonderful effect. The
thunder of bergs booms and rumbles through the foggy atmosphere. It is bad
weather for exploring but delightful nevertheless, making all the strange,
mysterious region yet stranger and more mysterious.
June 28. A light rain. We
were visited by two parties of Indians. A man from each canoe came ashore,
leaving the women in the canoe to guard against the berg-waves. I tried my
Chinook and made out to say that I wanted to hire two of them in a few days
to go a little way back on the glacier and around the bay. They are
seal-hunters and promised to come again with "Charley," who "hi yu kumtux
wawa Boston" — knew well how to speak English.
I saw three huge bergs born.
Spray rose about two hundred feet. Lovely reflections showed of the
pale-blue tones of the ice-wall and mountains in the calm water. Mirages are
common, making the stranded bergs along the shore look like the sheer
frontal wall of the glacier from which they were discharged.
I am watching the ice-wall,
berg life and behavior, etc. Yesterday and to-day a solitary small
flycatcher was feeding about camp. A sandpiper on the shore, loons, ducks,
gulls, and crows, a few of each, and a bald eagle are all the birds I have
noticed thus far. The glacier is thundering gloriously.
June 30. Clearing clouds and
sunshine. In less than a minute I saw three large bergs born. First there is
usually a preliminary thundering of comparatively small masses as the large
mass begins to fall, then the grand crash and boom and reverberating
roaring. Oftentimes three or four heavy main throbbing thuds and booming
explosions are heard as the main mass falls in several pieces, and also
secondary thuds and thunderings as the mass or masses plunge and rise again
and again ere they come to rest. Seldom, if ever, do the towers,
battlements, and pinnacles into which the front of the glacier is broken
fall forward headlong from their bases like falling trees at the water-level
or above or below it. They mostly sink vertically or nearly so, as if
undermined by the melting action of the water of the inlet, occasionally
maintaining their upright position after sinking far below the level of the
water, and rising again a hundred feet or more into the air with water
streaming like hair down their sides from their crowns, then launch forward
and fall flat with yet another thundering report, raising spray in
magnificent, flamelike, radiating jets and sheets, occasionally to the very
top of the front wall. Illumined by the sun, the spray and angular crystal
masses are indescribably beautiful. Some of the discharges pour in fragments
from clefts in the wall like waterfalls, white and mealy-looking, even dusty
with minute swirling ice-particles, followed by a rushing succession of
thunder-tones combining into a huge, blunt, solemn roar. Most of these
crumbling discharges are from the excessively shattered central part of the
ice-wall; the solid, deep-blue masses from the ends of the wall forming the
large bergs rise from the bottom of the glacier.
Many lesser reports are heard
at a distance of a mile or more from the fall of pinnacles into crevasses or
from the opening of new crevasses. The berg-discharges are very irregular,
from three to twenty-two an hour. On one rising tide, six hours, there were
sixty bergs discharged, large enough to thunder and be heard at distances of
from three quarters to one and a half miles; and on one succeeding falling
tide, six hours, sixty-nine were discharged.
July 1. We were awakened at
four o'clock this morning by the whistle of the steamer George W. Elder. I
went out on the moraine and waved my hand in salute and was answered by a
toot from the whistle. Soon a party came ashore and asked if I was Professor
Muir. The leader, Professor Harry Fielding Reid of Cleveland, Ohio,
introduced himself and his companion, Mr. Cushing, also of Cleveland, and
six or eight young students who had come well provided with instruments to
study the glacier. They landed seven or eight tons of freight and pitched
camp beside ours. I am delighted to have companions so congenial - we have
now a village.
As I set out to climb the
second mountain, three thousand feet high, on the east side of the glacier,
I met many tourists returning from a walk on the smooth east margin of the
glacier, and had to answer many questions. I had a hard climb, but wonderful
views were developed and I sketched the glacier from this high point and
most of its upper fountains.
Many fine alpine plants grew
here, an anemone on the summit, two species of cassiope in shaggy mats,
three or four dwarf willows, large blue hairy lupines eighteen inches high,
parnassia, phlox, solidago, dandelion, white-flowered bryanthus, daisy,
pedicularis, epilobium, etc., with grasses, sedges, mosses, and lichens,
forming a delightful deep spongy sod. Woodchucks stood erect and piped
dolefully for an hour "Chee-chee!" with jaws absurdly stretched to emit so
thin a note — rusty-looking, seedy fellows, also a smaller striped species
which stood erect and cheeped and whistled like a Douglas squirrel. I saw
three or four species of birds. A finch flew from her nest at my feet; and I
almost stepped on a family of young ptarmigan ere they scattered, little
bunches of downy brown silk, small but able to run well. They scattered
along a snow-bank, over boulders, through willows, grass, and flowers, while
the mother, very lame, tumbled and sprawled at my feet. I stood still until
the little ones began to peep; the mother answered "Tootoo-too" and showed
admirable judgment and devotion. She was in brown plumage with white on the
wing primaries. She had fine grounds on which to lead and feed her young.
Not a cloud in the sky
to-day; a faint film to the north vanished by noon, leaving all the sky full
of soft, hazy light. The magnificent mountains around the widespread
tributaries of the glacier; the great, gently-undulating, prairie-like
expanse of the main trunk, bluish on the east, pure white on the west and
north; its trains of moraines in magnificent curving lines and many colors
(black, gray, red, and brown) ; the stormy, cataract-like, crevassed
sections; the hundred fountains; the lofty, pure-white Fairweather Range;
the thunder of the plunging bergs; the fleet of bergs sailing tranquilly in
the inlet --- formed a glowing picture of Nature's beauty and power.
July 2. I crossed the inlet
with Mr. Reid and Mr. Adams to-day. The stratified drift on the west side
all the way from top to base contains fossil wood. On the east side, as far
as I have seen it, the wood occurs only in one stratum at a height of about
a hundred and twenty feet in sand and clay. Some in a bank of the west side
are rooted in clay soil. I noticed a large grove of stumps in a washed-out
channel near the glacier-front but had no time to examine closely. Evidently
a flood carrying great quantities of sand and gravel had overwhelmed and
broken off these trees, leaving high stumps. The deposit, about a hundred
feet or more above them, had been recently washed out by one of the draining
streams of the glacier, exposing a part of the old forest floor certainly
two or three centuries old.
I climbed along the right
bank of the lowest of the tributaries and set a signal flag on a ridge
fourteen hundred feet high. This tributary is about one and a fourth or one
and a half miles wide and has four secondary tributaries. It reaches
tide-water but gives off no bergs. Later I climbed the, large Nunatak
Island, seven thousand feet high, near the west margin of the glacier. It is
composed of crumbling granite draggled with washed boulders, but has some
enduring bosses which on sides and top are polished and scored rigidly,
showing that it had been heavily overswept by the glacier when it was
thousands of feet deeper than now, like a submerged boulder in a
river-channel. This island is very irregular in form, owing to the
variations in the structure joints of the granite. It has several small
lakelets and has been loaded with glacial drift, but by the melting of the
ice about its flanks is shedding it off, together with some of its own
crumbling surface. I descended a deep rock gully on the north side, the
rawest, dirtiest, dustiest, most dangerous that I have seen hereabouts.
There is also a large quantity of fossil wood scattered on this island,
especially on the north side, that on the south side having been cleared off
and carried away by the first tributary glacier, which, being lower and
melting earlier, has allowed the soil of the moraine material to fall,
together with its forest, and be carried off. That on the north side is now
being carried off or buried. The last of the main ice foundation is melting
and the moraine material re-formed over and over again, and the fallen
tree-trunks, decayed or half decayed or in a fair state of preservation, are
also unburied and buried again or carried off to the terminal or lateral
moraine.
I found three small seedling
Sitka spruces, feeble beginnings of a new forest. The circumference of the
island is about seven miles. I arrived at camp about midnight, tired and
cold. Sailing across the inlet in a cranky, rotten boat through the midst of
icebergs was dangerous, and I was glad to get ashore.
July 4. I climbed the east
wall to the summit, about thirty-one hundred feet or so, by the northernmost
ravine next to the yellow ridge, finding about a mile of snow in the upper
portion of the ravine and patches on the summit. A few of the patches
probably lie all the year, the ground beneath them is so plant-less. On the
edge of some of the snow-banks I noticed cassiope. The thin, green, mosslike
patches seen from camp are composed of a rich, shaggy growth of cassiope,
white-flowered bryanthus, dwarf vaccinium with bright pink flowers,
saxifrages, anemones, bluebells, gentians, small erigeron, pedicularis,
dwarf willow and a few species of grasses. Of these, Cassiope tetragona is
far the most influential and beautiful. Here it forms mats a foot thick and
an acre or more in area, the sections being measured by the size and
drainage of the soil-patches. I saw a few plants anchored in the less
crumbling parts of the steep-faced bosses and steps - parnassia, potentilla,
hedysarum, lutkea, etc. The lower, rough-looking patches half way up the
mountain are mostly alder bushes ten or fifteen feet high. I had a fine view
of the top of the mountain-mass which forms the boundary wall of the upper
portion of the inlet on the west side, and of several glaciers, tributary to
the first of the eastern tributaries of the main Muir Glacier. Five or six
of these tributaries were seen, most of them now melted off from the trunk
and independent. The highest peak to the eastward has an elevation of about
five thousand feet or a little less. I also had glorious views of the
Fairweather Range, La Perouse, Crillon, Lituya, and Fairweather. Mt.
Fairweather is the most beautiful of all the giants that stand guard about
Glacier Bay. When the sun is shining on it from the east or south its
magnificent glaciers and colors are brought out in most telling display. In
the late afternoon its features become less distinct. The atmosphere seems
pale and hazy, though around to the north and northeastward of Fairweather
innumerable white peaks are displayed, the highest fountain-heads of the
Muir Glacier crowded together in bewildering array, most exciting and
inviting to the mountaineer. Altogether I have had a delightful day, a truly
glorious celebration of the fourth.
July 6. I sailed three or
four miles down the east coast of the inlet with the Reid party's cook, who
is supposed to be an experienced camper and prospector, and landed at a
stratified moraine-bank. It was here that I camped in 1880, a point at that
time less than half a mile from the front of the glacier, now one and a half
miles. I found my Indian's old camp made just ten years ago, and Professor
Wright's of five years ago. Their alder-bough beds and fireplace were still
marked and but little decayed. I found thirty-three species of plants in
flower, not counting willows — a showy garden on the shore only a few feet
above high tide, watered by a fine stream. Lutkea, hedysarum, parnassia,
epilobium, bluebell, solidago, habenaria, strawberry with fruit half grown,
arctostaphylos, mertensia, erigeron, willows, tall grasses and alder are the
principal species. There are many butterflies in this garden. Gulls are
breeding near here. I saw young in the water to-day.
On my way back to camp I
discovered a group of monumental stumps in a washed-out valley of the
moraine and went ashore to observe them. They are in the dry course of a
flood-channel about eighty feet above mean tide and four or five hundred
yards back from the shore, where they have been pounded and battered by
boulders rolling against them and over them, making them look like gigantic
shaving-brushes. The largest is about three feet in diameter and probably
three hundred years old. I mean to return and examine them at leisure. A
smaller stump, still firmly rooted, is standing astride of an old crumbling
trunk, showing that at least two generations of trees flourished here
undisturbed by the advance or retreat of the glacier or by its draining
stream-floods. They are Sitka spruces and the wood is mostly in a good state
of preservation. How these trees were broken off without being uprooted is
dark to me at present. Perhaps most of their companions were uprooted and
carried away.
July 7. Another fine day;
scarce a cloud in the sky. The icebergs in the bay are miraged in the
distance to look like the frontal wall of a great glacier. I am writing
letters in anticipation of the next steamer, the Queen.
She arrived about 2.30 P.M.
with two hundred and thirty tourists. What a show they made with their
ribbons and kodaks! All seemed happy and enthusiastic, though it was curious
to see how promptly all of them ceased gazing when the dinner-bell rang, and
how many turned from the great thundering crystal world of ice to look
curiously at the Indians that came alongside to sell trinkets, and how our
little camp and kitchen arrangements excited so many to loiter and waste
their precious time prying into our poor hut.
July 8. A fine clear day. I
went up the glacier to observe stakes and found that a marked point near the
middle of the current had flowed about a hundred feet in eight days. On the
medial moraine one mile from the front there was no measurable displacement.
I found a raven devouring a tom-cod that was alive on a shallow at the mouth
of the creek. It had probably been wounded by a seal or eagle.
July 10. I have been getting
acquainted with the main features of the glacier and its fountain mountains
with reference to an exploration of its main tributaries and the upper part
of its prairie-like trunk, a trip I have long had in mind. I have been
building a sled and must now get fully ready to start without reference to
the weather. Yesterday evening I saw a large blue berg just as it was
detached sliding down from the front. Two of Professor Reid's party rowed
out to it as it sailed past the camp, estimating it to be two hundred and
forty feet in length and one hundred feet high. |
