WRANGELL NARROWS AND TAKU GLACIERS.
If there were not so many more wonderful places in Alaska, Wrangell
Narrows would give it a scenic fame, and make its fortune in the coming
centuries when tourists and yachts will crowd these waters, and poets
and seafaring novelists desert the Scotch coast for these northwestern
isles. Instead of William Black’s everlasting Oban, and Staffa, and
Skye, and heroines with a burr in their speech, we will read of Kasa-an
and Kaigan, Taku and Chilkat, and maidens who lisp in soft accents the
deep, gurgling Chinook, or the older dialects of their races. Wrangell
Narrows is a sinuous channel between mountainous islands, and for thirty
miles it is hard to determine which one of the perpendicular walls at
the end of the strait will finally stop us with its impassable front.
There are dangerous ledges and rocks, and strong tides rushing through
this pass, and the average depth of from four to twelve fathoms is very
shallow water for Alaska. Although long known and used by the Indians
and the Hudson Bay Company’s traders, it was not considered a safe
inside passage; and as Vancouver had not explored it, and there were not
any complete charts, it was little traversed by regular commerce. After
United States occupation, and the increased travel to Sitka, the perils
of Cape Ommaney, off the south end of Baranoff Island, quite matched any
dangers there might be in the unknown channel. Captain R. W. Meade, in
command of the U. S. S. _Saginaw_, made a survey of the Narrows in 1869,
and gradually the way through the ledges and flats and tide rips became
better known. In 1884 Captain Coghlan, commander of the U. S. S. _Adams_
carefully sounded and marked off the channel with stakes and buoys, and
the navigators now only look for the favorable turn of the tide in going
through the picturesque reaches.
Leaving Fort Wrangell in the afternoon, it was an enchanting trip up
that narrow channel of deep waters, rippling between bold island shores
and parallel mountain walls. Besides the clear, emerald tide, reflecting
every tree and rock, there was the beauty of foaming cataracts leaping
down the sides of snow-capped mountains, and the grandeur of great
glaciers pushing down through sharp ravines, and dropping miniature
icebergs into the water. Three glaciers are visible at once on the east
side of the Narrows, the larger one extending back some forty miles, and
measuring four miles across the front, that faces the water and the
terminal moraine it has built up before it. The great glacier is known
as Patterson Glacier, in honor of the late Carlisle Patterson, of the
United States Coast Survey, and is the first in the great line of
glaciers that one encounters along the Alaska coast. Under the shadow of
a cloud the glacier was a dirty and uneven snow field, but touched by
the last light of the sun it was a frozen lake of wonderland, shimmering
with silvery lights, and showing a pale ethereal green, and deep, pure
blue, in all the rifts and crevasses in its icy front.
With the appearance of this first glacier, and the presence of ice
floating in the waters around us, the conversation of all on board took
a scientific turn, and facts, fancies, and wild theories about glacial
origin and action were advanced that would have struck panic to any body
of geologists. Being all laymen, there was no one to expound the
mysteries and speak with final authority on any of these frozen and
well-established truths; and we floundered about in a sea of
suppositions, and were lost in a labyrinth of lame conclusions.
A long chain of snow-capped mountains slowly unrolled as the ship
emerged from Wrangell Narrows, more glaciers were brought to view, and
that strange granite monument, the “Devil’s Thumb,” as named by
Commander Meade, signalled us from a mountain top.
Farther up, in Stephens Passage, floating ice tells of the great
glaciers in Holkam or Soundoun Bay, and beside the one great Soundoun
glacier flowing into the sea, there are three other glaciers hidden in
the high-walled fiords that open from the bay. One of the first and most
adventurous visitors to the Soundoun glacier was Captain J. W. White, of
the Revenue Marine, who anchored the cutter _Lincoln_ in the bay in
1868. Seeing a great arch or tunnel in the front of the glacier, he had
his men row the small boat into the deep blue grotto, and they went a
hundred feet down a crystalline corridor whose roof was a thousand feet
thick. The colors, he said, were marvellous, and, like the galleries cut
in the Alpine glaciers, showed fresh wonders with each advance. At the
furthest point the adventurous boatmen poured out libations and drank to
the spirits of the ice kingdom. In 1876 gold was discovered, and the
Soundoun placers were the first ones worked in Alaska. Professor Muir
visited the glacier and mines of Soundoun Bay in 1879, and at Shough, a
camp in a valley at the head of the inlet, found miners at work with
their primitive rockers and sluices. In 1880 these mines yielded
$10,000, and the miners believed the bed of gold-bearing gravel
inexhaustible. The discovery of gold at Juneau drew the most of them
away, and the Soundoun placers have hardly been heard of in later years.
Winding north, through a broad channel with noble mountain ranges on
either side, we passed the old Hudson Bay Company’s trading post of
Taku, and at mention of this name those who believe in the Asiatic
origin of the Alaska Indians cried out in delighted surprise: “There is
a Chinese city of the same name and spelled in the same way as
this—Taku.”
Reaching the mouth of Taku Inlet, into which the Taku River empties, the
floating ice gave evidence of the great glaciers that lie within; and,
following up this fiord for about fifteen miles to a great basin, we
came suddenly in sight of three glaciers. One sloped down a steep and
rather narrow ravine, and its front was hidden by another turn in the
overlapping hills. The second one pushed down between two high
mountains, and, resting its tongue on the water, dropped off the
icebergs and cakes that covered the surface of the dull, gray-green
water. The front of this icy cliff stretched entirely across the
half-mile gap between the mountains, and its face rose a hundred and two
hundred feet from the water, every foot of it seamed, jagged, and rent
with great fissures, in which the palest prismatic hues were flashing.
As the tide fell, large pieces fell from this front, and avalanches of
ice-fragments crashed down into the sea and raised waves that rocked our
ship and set the ice-floes grinding together. On the other point of the
crescent of this bay there lay the largest glacier, an ice-field that
swept down from two mountain gorges, and, spreading out in fan shape,
descended in a long slope to a moraine of sand, pebbles, and boulders.
Across its rolling front this glacier measured at least three miles, and
the low, level moraine was one mile in width. The moraine’s slope was so
gradual that when the small boats were lowered and we started for shore,
they grounded one hundred feet from the water-mark and there stuck until
the passengers were taken off one by one in the lightest boat, and then
carried over the last twenty feet of water in the sailors’ arms. It was
a time for old clothes, to begin with, and everyone wore their worst
when they started off; but at the finish, when the same set waded
through a quarter of a mile of sand and mineral mud left exposed by the
falling tide, and were dumped into the boats by the sailors, a near
relative would not have owned one of us. The landing of the glacier
pilgrims was a scene worthy of the nimblest caricaturist, and sympathy
welled up for the poor officers and sailors who shouldered stout men and
women and struggled ashore through sinking mud and water. The burly
captain picked out the slightest young girl and carried her ashore like
a doll; but the second officer, deceived by the hollow eyes of one tall
woman, lifted her up gallantly, floundered for a while in the mud and
the awful surprise of her weight, and then bearer and burden took a
headlong plunge. The newly-married man carried his bride off on his
back, and had that novel incident to put down in the voluminous journal
of the honeymoon kept by the young couple.
We trailed along in files, like so many ants, across the sandy moraine,
sinking in the soft “mountain meal,” stumbling over acres of smooth
rocks and pebbles, and jumping shallow streams that wandered down from
the melting ice. Patches of epilobium crimsoned the ground with rank
blossoms near the base of the glacier, and at last we began ascending
the dull, dirty, gray ice hills.
There was a wonderful stillness in the air, and the clear, sunny, blue
sky brooded peacefully over the wonderful scene. The crunching of the
footsteps on the rough ice could be heard a long way, and from every
crevice came the rumble and roar of the streams under the ice. Rising
five hundred feet or more by a gradual incline of half a mile, we were
as far from seeing the source of the glacier as ever; and the vast
snow-fields from which the streams of ice emerge were still hidden by
the spurs of the mountain round which they poured. At that point there
were some deep crevasses in the ice, and leaning over we looked down
into the bottomless rifts. The young Catholic priest, forgetting
everything in the ardor of the moment and the ice-fever, labored like a
giant, hurling vast boulders into the depths, that we might hear the
repeated crashes as they struck from side to side, before the splash
told that they had reached the subterranean river that roared so
fiercely. In the outer sunshine the ice sparkled like broken bits of
silver, but in the crevasses the colors were intensified from the palest
ice-green to a deeper and deeper blue that was lost in shadowy purple at
the last point. The travellers who had learned their glaciers in
Switzerland sat amazed at the view before them, and owned that the
glacier on which they were sitting was much larger and more broken than
the _Mer de Glace_, while nothing in the Alps could equal the smaller
glacier beyond, that lay glittering like a great jewel-house and
dropping bergs of beryl and sapphire into the sea.
Where the two arms of the glacier united, the lines of converging
ice-streams were marked by great trains of boulders and patches of dirt;
and fragments of quartz and granite, and iron-stained rocks were
souvenirs that the pilgrims carried off by the pocketful. We sat on
rough boulders and looked down into the ice-ravines on every side, and
sighed breathlessly in the ecstasy of joy. An earthly and material soul
roused the scorn of the young Catholic divine by sitting down in that
exalted spot to eat—to munch soda crackers from a brown-paper
bundle—while the wreck of glaciers, the crash of icebergs, the grinding
of ice-floes, and world-building were going on about him.
We ran down the glacier slopes hand in hand, in long lines that “snapped
the whip” and went all-hands-round on the more level places, or crept in
cautious file along the narrow ridges between crevasses. We drank from
icy rills that ran in channels of clear green ice, and crossing the
moraine, we waded through mud ankle deep and were carried to the boats.
The receding tide had obliged the sailors to push the boats further and
further off, and when one frail bark was about full there was a crash,
an avalanche of ice went splashing into the sea from the smaller glacier
up the bay, and a great wave curling from it washed the boat back and
left it grounded. Men without rubber boots were then so well soaked and
so plastered with glacier mud that they just stepped over the boat’s
side and helped the rubber-clad sailors float it off. The lower deck and
the engine-room were hanging full and strewn with muddy boots and drying
clothes all day, and the stewards were heard to wonder “what great fun
there was in getting all their clothes spoiled, that the passengers need
take on so over a glacier.”
When Vancouver went to the head of Taku Inlet in 1794 he found “frozen
mountains” surrounding it on every side, and his boats were so
endangered by the floating ice, that his men gladly hurried away from
it. Prospectors have had their camps at the mouth of the river at the
head of the basin, and have searched the bars and shores of Taku River
for miles across the mountain wall. Their evidence and that of the fur
traders, who give scant notice to such things, prove the Indian
traditions, that the ice is receding rapidly, and that the ice mountain
that now sets back with a great moraine before it, came down to the
water’s edge in their fathers’ days.
That day on the Taku glacier will live forever as one of the rarest and
most perfect enjoyment. The grandest objects in nature were before us,
the primeval forces that mould the face of the earth were at work, and
it was all so far away and out of the everyday world that we might have
been walking a new planet, fresh fallen from the Creator’s hand. The
lights and shadows on the hills, and the range of colors, were
superb,—every tiny ice-cake in the water showing colors as rare and
fleeting as the shades of an opal, while the gleaming ice-cliff, from
which these jewels dropped, was aglow with all the prismatic lights and
tinted in lines of deepest indigo in the great caverns and rifts of its
front. The sunny, sparkling air was most exhilarating, and we sat on the
after-deck basking in the golden rays of the afternoon sun, and looked
back regretfully as the glaciers receded and were lost to sight by a
turn in the fiord.