While Stickeen and I were away, a Hoona, one of the head men of the

tribe, paid Mr. Young a visit, and presented him with porpoise-meat and

berries and much interesting information. He naturally expected a

return visit, and when we called at his house, a mile or two down the

fiord, he said his wives were out in the rain gathering fresh berries

to complete a feast prepared for us. We remained, however, only a few

minutes, for I was not aware of this arrangement or of Mr. Young’s

promise until after leaving the house. Anxiety to get around Cape

Wimbledon was the cause of my haste, fearing the storm might increase.

On account of this ignorance, no apologies were offered him, and the

upshot was that the good Hoona became very angry. We succeeded,

however, in the evening of the same day, in explaining our haste, and

by sincere apologies and presents made peace.

After a hard struggle we got around stormy Wimbledon and into the next

fiord to the northward (Klunastucksana—Dundas Bay). A cold, drenching

rain was falling, darkening but not altogether hiding its extraordinary

beauty, made up of lovely reaches and side fiords, feathery headlands

and islands, beautiful every one and charmingly collocated. But how it

rained, and how cold it was, and how weary we were pulling most of the

time against the wind! The branches of this bay are so deep and so

numerous that, with the rain and low clouds concealing the mountain

landmarks, we could hardly make out the main trends. While groping and

gazing among the islands through the misty rain and clouds, we

discovered wisps of smoke at the foot of a sheltering rock in front of

a mountain, where a choir of cascades were chanting their rain songs.

Gladly we made for this camp, which proved to belong to a rare old

Hoona sub-chief, so tall and wide and dignified in demeanor he looked

grand even in the sloppy weather, and every inch a chief in spite of

his bare legs and the old shirt and draggled, ragged blanket in which

he was dressed. He was given to much handshaking, gripping hard,

holding on and looking you gravely in the face while most emphatically

speaking in Thlinkit, not a word of which we understood until

interpreter John came to our help. He turned from one to the other of

us, declaring, as John interpreted, that our presence did him good like

food and fire, that he would welcome white men, especially teachers,

and that he and all his people compared to ourselves were only

children. When Mr. Young informed him that a missionary was about to be

sent to his people, he said he would call them all together four times

and explain that a teacher and preacher were coming and that they

therefore must put away all foolishness and prepare their hearts to

receive them and their words. He then introduced his three children,

one a naked lad five or six years old who, as he fondly assured us,

would soon be a chief, and later to his wife, an intelligent-looking

woman of whom he seemed proud. When we arrived she was out at the foot

of the cascade mountain gathering salmon-berries. She came in dripping

and loaded. A few of the fine berries saved for the children she

presented, proudly and fondly beginning with the youngest, whose only

clothing was a nose-ring and a string of beads. She was lightly

appareled in a cotton gown and bit of blanket, thoroughly bedraggled,

but after unloading her berries she retired with a dry calico gown

around the corner of a rock and soon returned fresh as a daisy and with

becoming dignity took her place by the fireside. Soon two other

berry-laden women came in, seemingly enjoying the rain like the bushes

and trees. They put on little clothing so that they may be the more

easily dried, and as for the children, a thin shirt of sheeting is the

most they encumber themselves with, and get wet and half dry without

seeming to notice it while we shiver with two or three dry coats. They

seem to prefer being naked. The men also wear but little in wet

weather. When they go out for all day they put on a single blanket, but

in choring around camp, getting firewood, cooking, or looking after

their precious canvas, they seldom wear anything, braving wind and rain

in utter nakedness to avoid the bother of drying clothes. It is a rare

sight to see the children bringing in big chunks of firewood on their

shoulders, balancing in crossing boulders with firmly set bow-legs and

bulging back muscles.

We gave Ka-hood-oo-shough, the old chief, some tobacco and rice and

coffee, and pitched our tent near his hut among tall grass. Soon after

our arrival the Taylor Bay sub-chief came in from the opposite

direction from ours, telling us that he came through a cut-off passage

not on our chart. As stated above, we took pains to conciliate him and

soothe his hurt feelings. Our words and gifts, he said, had warmed his

sore heart and made him glad and comfortable.

The view down the bay among the islands was, I thought, the finest of

this kind of scenery that I had yet observed.

The weather continued cold and rainy. Nevertheless Mr. Young and I and

our crew, together with one of the Hoonas, an old man who acted as

guide, left camp to explore one of the upper arms of the bay, where we

were told there was a large glacier. We managed to push the canoe

several miles up the stream that drains the glacier to a point where

the swift current was divided among rocks and the banks were overhung

with alders and willows. I left the canoe and pushed up the right bank

past a magnificent waterfall some twelve hundred feet high, and over

the shoulder of a mountain, until I secured a good view of the lower

part of the glacier. It is probably a lobe of the Taylor Bay or Brady

Glacier.

On our return to camp, thoroughly drenched and cold, the old chief came

to visit us, apparently as wet and cold as ourselves.

“I have been thinking of you all day,” he said, “and pitying you,

knowing how miserable you were, and as soon as I saw your canoe coming

back I was ashamed to think that I had been sitting warm and dry at my

fire while you were out in the storm; therefore I made haste to strip

off my dry clothing and put on these wet rags to share your misery and

show how much I love you.”

I had another long talk with Ka-hood-oo-shough the next day.

“I am not able,” he said, “to tell you how much good your words have

done me. Your words are good, and they are strong words. Some of my

people are foolish, and when they make their salmon-traps they do not

take care to tie the poles firmly together, and when the big

rain-floods come the traps break and are washed away because the people

who made them are foolish people. But your words are strong words and

when storms come to try them they will stand the storms.”

There was much hand shaking as we took our leave and assurances of

eternal friendship. The grand old man stood on the shore watching us

and waving farewell until we were out of sight.

We now steered for the Muir Glacier and arrived at the front on the

east side the evening of the third, and camped on the end of the

moraine, where there was a small stream. Captain Tyeen was inclined to

keep at a safe distance from the tremendous threatening cliffs of the

discharging wall. After a good deal of urging he ventured within half a

mile of them, on the east side of the fiord, where with Mr. Young I

went ashore to seek a camp-ground on the moraine, leaving the Indians

in the canoe. In a few minutes after we landed a huge berg sprung aloft

with awful commotion, and the frightened Indians incontinently fled

down the fiord, plying their paddles with admirable energy in the

tossing waves until a safe harbor was reached around the south end of

the moraine. I found a good place for a camp in a slight hollow where a

few spruce stumps afforded firewood. But all efforts to get Tyeen out

of his harbor failed. “Nobody knew,” he said, “how far the angry ice

mountain could throw waves to break his canoe.” Therefore I had my

bedding and some provisions carried to my stump camp, where I could

watch the bergs as they were discharged and get night views of the brow

of the glacier and its sheer jagged face all the way across from side

to side of the channel. One night the water was luminous and the surge

from discharging icebergs churned the water into silver fire, a

glorious sight in the darkness. I also went back up the east side of

the glacier five or six miles and ascended a mountain between its first

two eastern tributaries, which, though covered with grass near the top,

was exceedingly steep and difficult. A bulging ridge near the top I

discovered was formed of ice, a remnant of the glacier when it stood at

this elevation which had been preserved by moraine material and later

by a thatch of dwarf bushes and grass.

Next morning at daybreak I pushed eagerly back over the comparatively

smooth eastern margin of the glacier to see as much as possible of the

upper fountain region. About five miles back from the front I climbed a

mountain twenty-five hundred feet high, from the flowery summit of

which, the day being clear, the vast glacier and its principal branches

were displayed in one magnificent view. Instead of a stream of ice

winding down a mountain-walled valley like the largest of the Swiss

glaciers, the Muir looks like a broad undulating prairie streaked with

medial moraines and gashed with crevasses, surrounded by numberless

mountains from which flow its many tributary glaciers. There are seven

main tributaries from ten to twenty miles long and from two to six

miles wide where they enter the trunk, each of them fed by many

secondary tributaries; so that the whole number of branches, great and

small, pouring from the mountain fountains perhaps number upward of two

hundred, not counting the smallest. The area drained by this one grand

glacier can hardly be less than seven or eight hundred miles, and

probably contains as much ice as all the eleven hundred Swiss glaciers

combined. Its length from the frontal wall back to the head of its

farthest fountain seemed to be about forty or fifty miles, and the

width just below the confluence of the main tributaries about

twenty-five miles. Though apparently motionless as the mountains, it

flows on forever, the speed varying in every part with the seasons, but

mostly with the depth of the current, and the declivity, smoothness and

directness of the different portions of the basin. The flow of the

central cascading portion near the front, as determined by Professor

Reid, is at the rate of from two and a half to five inches an hour, or

from five to ten feet a day. A strip of the main trunk about a mile in

width, extending along the eastern margin about fourteen miles to a

lake filled with bergs, has so little motion and is so little

interrupted by crevasses, a hundred horsemen might ride abreast over it

without encountering very much difficulty.

But far the greater portion of the vast expanse looking smooth in the

distance is torn and crumpled into a bewildering network of hummocky

ridges and blades, separated by yawning gulfs and crevasses, so that

the explorer, crossing it from shore to shore, must always have a hard

time. In hollow spots here and there in the heart of the icy wilderness

are small lakelets fed by swift-glancing streams that flow without

friction in blue shining channels, making delightful melody, singing

and ringing in silvery tones of peculiar sweetness, radiant crystals

like flowers ineffably fine growing in dazzling beauty along their

banks. Few, however, will be likely to enjoy them. Fortunately to most

travelers the thundering ice-wall, while comfortably accessible, is

also the most strikingly interesting portion of the glacier.

The mountains about the great glacier were also seen from this

standpoint in exceedingly grand and telling views, ranged and grouped

in glorious array. Along the valleys of the main tributaries to the

northwestward I saw far into their shadowy depths, one noble peak in

its snowy robes appearing beyond another in fine perspective. One of

the most remarkable of them, fashioned like a superb crown with

delicately fluted sides, stands in the middle of the second main

tributary, counting from left to right. To the westward the magnificent

Fairweather Range is displayed in all its glory, lifting its peaks and

glaciers into the blue sky. Mt. Fairweather, though not the highest, is

the noblest and most majestic in port and architecture of all the

sky-dwelling company. La Pérouse, at the south end of the range, is

also a magnificent mountain, symmetrically peaked and sculptured, and

wears its robes of snow and glaciers in noble style. Lituya, as seen

from here, is an immense tower, severely plain and massive. It makes a

fine and terrible and lonely impression. Crillon, though the loftiest

of all (being nearly sixteen thousand feet high), presents no

well-marked features. Its ponderous glaciers have ground it away into

long, curling ridges until, from this point of view, it resembles a

huge twisted shell. The lower summits about the Muir Glacier, like this

one, the first that I climbed, are richly adorned and enlivened with

flowers, though they make but a faint show in general views. Lines and

dashes of bright green appear on the lower slopes as one approaches

them from the glacier, and a fainter green tinge may be noticed on the

subordinate summits at a height of two thousand or three thousand feet.

The lower are mostly alder bushes and the topmost a lavish profusion of

flowering plants, chiefly cassiope, vaccinium, pyrola, erigeron,

gentiana, campanula, anemone, larkspur, and columbine, with a few

grasses and ferns. Of these cassiope is at once the commonest and the

most beautiful and influential. In some places its delicate stems make

mattresses more than a foot thick over several acres, while the bloom

is so abundant that a single handful plucked at random contains

hundreds of its pale pink bells. The very thought of this Alaska garden

is a joyful exhilaration. Though the storm-beaten ground it is growing

on is nearly half a mile high, the glacier centuries ago flowed over it

as a river flows over a boulder; but out of all the cold darkness and

glacial crushing and grinding comes this warm, abounding beauty and

life to teach us that what we in our faithless ignorance and fear call

destruction is creation finer and finer.

When night was approaching I scrambled down out of my blessed garden to

the glacier, and returned to my lonely camp, and, getting some coffee

and bread, again went up the moraine to the east end of the great

ice-wall. It is about three miles long, but the length of the jagged,

berg-producing portion that stretches across the fiord from side to

side like a huge green-and-blue barrier is only about two miles and

rises above the water to a height of from two hundred and fifty to

three hundred feet. Soundings made by Captain Carroll show that seven

hundred and twenty feet of the wall is below the surface, and a third

unmeasured portion is buried beneath the moraine detritus deposited at

the foot of it. Therefore, were the water and rocky detritus cleared

away, a sheer precipice of ice would be presented nearly two miles long

and more than a thousand feet high. Seen from a distance, as you come

up the fiord, it seems comparatively regular in form, but it is far

otherwise; bold, jagged capes jut forward into the fiord, alternating

with deep reentering angles and craggy hollows with plain bastions,

while the top is roughened with innumerable spires and pyramids and

sharp hacked blades leaning and toppling or cutting straight into the

sky.

The number of bergs given off varies somewhat with the weather and the

tides, the average being about one every five or six minutes, counting

only those that roar loud enough to make themselves heard at a distance

of two or three miles. The very largest, however, may under favorable

conditions be heard ten miles or even farther. When a large mass sinks

from the upper fissured portion of the wall, there is first a keen,

prolonged, thundering roar, which slowly subsides into a low muttering

growl, followed by numerous smaller grating clashing sounds from the

agitated bergs that dance in the waves about the newcomer as if in

welcome; and these again are followed by the swash and roar of the

waves that are raised and hurled up the beach against the moraines. But

the largest and most beautiful of the bergs, instead of thus falling

from the upper weathered portion of the wall, rise from the submerged

portion with a still grander commotion, springing with tremendous voice

and gestures nearly to the top of the wall, tons of water streaming

like hair down their sides, plunging and rising again and again before

they finally settle in perfect poise, free at last, after having formed

part of the slow-crawling glacier for centuries. And as we contemplate

their history, as they sail calmly away down the fiord to the sea, how

wonderful it seems that ice formed from pressed snow on the far-off

mountains two or three hundred years ago should still be pure and

lovely in color after all its travel and toil in the rough mountain

quarries, grinding and fashioning the features of predestined

landscapes.

When sunshine is sifting through the midst of the multitude of icebergs

that fill the fiord and through the jets of radiant spray ever rising

from the tremendous dashing and splashing of the falling and

upspringing bergs, the effect is indescribably glorious. Glorious, too,

are the shows they make in the night when the moon and stars are

shining. The berg-thunder seems far louder than by day, and the

projecting buttresses seem higher as they stand forward in the pale

light, relieved by gloomy hollows, while the new-born bergs are dimly

seen, crowned with faint lunar rainbows in the up-dashing spray. But it

is in the darkest nights when storms are blowing and the waves are

phosphorescent that the most impressive displays are made. Then the

long range of ice-bluffs is plainly seen stretching through the gloom

in weird, unearthly splendor, luminous wave foam dashing against every

bluff and drifting berg; and ever and anon amid all this wild auroral

splendor some huge new-born berg dashes the living water into yet

brighter foam, and the streaming torrents pouring from its sides are

worn as robes of light, while they roar in awful accord with the winds

and waves, deep calling unto deep, glacier to glacier, from fiord to

fiord over all the wonderful bay.

After spending a few days here, we struck across to the main Hoona

village on the south side of Icy Strait, thence by a long cut-off with

one short portage to Chatham Strait, and thence down through Peril

Strait, sailing all night, hoping to catch the mail steamer at Sitka.

We arrived at the head of the strait about daybreak. The tide was

falling, and rushing down with the swift current as if descending a

majestic cataract was a memorable experience. We reached Sitka the same

night, and there I paid and discharged my crew, making allowance for a

couple of days or so for the journey back home to Fort Wrangell, while

I boarded the steamer for Portland and thus ended my explorations for

this season.

Part III

_The Trip of 1890_

Chapter XVII

In Camp at Glacier Bay

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 Pt. 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

spiræa 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.M. 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

water-wheel, 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 morame

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 ice bergs, 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 P.M. I had

intended getting back at noon and sending letters and bidding friends

good-bye, 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 hall 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

“Too-too-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 plantless. 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 Pérouse, 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 up rooted

and carried away.

[Illustration: Ruins of Buried Forest, East Side of Muir Glacier.]

_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 measureable 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.

Chapter XVIII

My Sled-Trip on the Muir Glacier

I started off the morning of July 11 on my memorable sled-trip to

obtain general views of the main upper part of the Muir Glacier and its

seven principal tributaries, feeling sure that I would learn something

and at the same time get rid of a severe bronchial cough that followed

an attack of the grippe and had troubled me for three months. I

intended to camp on the glacier every night, and did so, and my throat

grew better every day until it was well, for no lowland microbe could

stand such a trip. My sled was about three feet long and made as light

as possible. A sack of hardtack, a little tea and sugar, and a

sleeping-bag were firmly lashed on it so that nothing could drop off

however much it might be jarred and dangled in crossing crevasses.

Two Indians carried the baggage over the rocky moraine to the clear

glacier at the side of one of the eastern Nunatak Islands. Mr. Loomis

accompanied me to this first camp and assisted in dragging the empty

sled over the moraine. We arrived at the middle Nunatak Island about

nine o’clock. Here I sent back my Indian carriers, and Mr. Loomis

assisted me the first day in hauling the loaded sled to my second camp

at the foot of Hemlock Mountain, returning the next morning.

_July 13_. I skirted the mountain to eastward a few miles and was

delighted to discover a group of trees high up on its ragged rocky

side, the first trees I had seen on the shores of Glacier Bay or on

those of any of its glaciers. I left my sled on the ice and climbed the

mountain to see what I might learn. I found that all the trees were

mountain hemlock (_Tsuga mertensiana_), and were evidently the remnant

of an old well-established forest, standing on the only ground that was

stable, all the rest of the forest below it having been sloughed off

with the soil from the disintegrating slate bed rock. The lowest of the

trees stood at an elevation of about two thousand feet above the sea,

the highest at about three thousand feet or a little higher. Nothing

could be more striking than the contrast between the raw, crumbling,

deforested portions of the mountain, looking like a quarry that was

being worked, and the forested part with its rich, shaggy beds of

cassiope and bryanthus in full bloom, and its sumptuous cushions of

flower-enameled mosses. These garden-patches are full of gay colors of

gentian, erigeron, anemone, larkspur, and columbine, and are enlivened

with happy birds and bees and marmots. Climbing to an elevation of

twenty-five hundred feet, which is about fifteen hundred feet above the

level of the glacier at this point, I saw and heard a few marmots, and

three ptarmigans that were as tame as barnyard fowls. The sod is

sloughing off on the edges, keeping it ragged. The trees are storm-bent

from the southeast. A few are standing at an elevation of nearly three

thousand feet; at twenty-five hundred feet, pyrola, veratrum,

vaccinium, fine grasses, sedges, willows, mountain-ash, buttercups, and

acres of the most luxuriant cassiope are in bloom.

A lake encumbered with icebergs lies at the end of Divide Glacier. A

spacious, level-floored valley beyond it, eight or ten miles long, with

forested mountains on its west side, perhaps discharges to the

southeastward into Lynn Canal. The divide of the glacier is about

opposite the third of the eastern tributaries. Another berg-dotted lake

into which the drainage of the Braided Glacier flows, lies a few miles

to the westward and is one and a half miles long. Berg Lake is next the

remarkable Girdled Glacier to the southeastward.

When the ice-period was in its prime, much of the Muir Glacier that now

flows northward into Howling Valley flowed southward into Glacier Bay

as a tributary of the Muir. All the rock contours show this, and so do

the medial moraines. Berg Lake is crowded with bergs because they have

no outlet and melt slowly. I heard none discharged. I had a hard time

crossing the Divide Glacier, on which I camped. Half a mile back from

the lake I gleaned a little fossil wood and made a fire on moraine

boulders for tea. I slept fairly well on the sled. I heard the roar of

four cascades on a shaggy green mountain on the west side of Howling

Valley and saw three wild goats fifteen hundred feet up in the steep

grassy pastures.

_July 14_. I rose at four o’clock this cloudy and dismal morning and

looked for my goats, but saw only one. I thought there must be wolves

where there were goats, and in a few minutes heard their low, dismal,

far-reaching howling. One of them sounded very near and came nearer

until it seemed to be less than a quarter of a mile away on the edge of

the glacier. They had evidently seen me, and one or more had come down

to observe me, but I was unable to catch sight of any of them. About

half an hour later, while I was eating breakfast, they began howling

again, so near I began to fear they had a mind to attack me, and I made

haste to the shelter of a big square boulder, where, though I had no

gun, I might be able to defend myself from a front attack with my

alpenstock. After waiting half an hour or so to see what these wild

dogs meant to do, I ventured to proceed on my journey to the foot of

Snow Dome, where I camped for the night.

There are six tributaries on the northwest side of Divide arm, counting

to the Gray Glacier, next after Granite Cañon Glacier going northwest.

Next is Dirt Glacier, which is dead. I saw bergs on the edge of the

main glacier a mile back from here which seem to have been left by the

draining of a pool in a sunken hollow. A circling rim of driftwood,

back twenty rods on the glacier, marks the edge of the lakelet shore

where the bergs lie scattered and stranded. It is now half past ten

o’clock and getting dusk as I sit by my little fossil-wood fire writing

these notes. A strange bird is calling and complaining. A stream is

rushing into a glacier well on the edge of which I am camped, back a

few yards from the base of the mountain for fear of falling stones. A

few small ones are rattling down the steep slope. I must go to bed.

_July 15_. I climbed the dome to plan a way, scan the glacier, and take

bearings, etc., in case of storms. The main divide is about fifteen

hundred feet; the second divide, about fifteen hundred also, is about

one and one half miles southeastward. The flow of water on the glacier

noticeably diminished last night though there was no frost. It is now

already increasing. Stones begin to roll into the crevasses and into

new positions, sliding against each other, half turning over or falling

on moraine ridges. Mud pellets with small pebbles slip and roll slowly

from ice-hummocks again and again. How often and by how many ways are

boulders finished and finally brought to anything like permanent form

and place in beds for farms and fields, forests and gardens. Into

crevasses and out again, into moraines, shifted and reinforced and

reformed by avalanches, melting from pedestals, etc. Rain, frost, and

dew help in the work; they are swept in rills, caught and ground in

pot-hole mills. Moraines of washed pebbles, like those on glacier

margins, are formed by snow avalanches deposited in crevasses, then

weathered out and projected on the ice as shallow raised moraines.

There is one such at this camp.

A ptarmigan is on a rock twenty yards distant, as if on show. It has

red over the eye, a white line, not conspicuous, over the red, belly

white, white markings over the upper parts on ground of brown and black

wings, mostly white as seen when flying, but the coverts the same as

the rest of the body. Only about three inches of the folded primaries

show white. The breast seems to have golden iridescent colors, white

under the wings. It allowed me to approach within twenty feet. It

walked down a sixty degree slope of the rock, took flight with a few

whirring wing-beats, then sailed with wings perfectly motionless four

hundred yards down a gentle grade, and vanished over the brow of a

cliff. Ten days ago Loomis told me that he found a nest with nine eggs.

On the way down to my sled I saw four more ptarmigans. They utter harsh

notes when alarmed. “Crack, chuck, crack,” with the _r_ rolled and

prolonged. I also saw fresh and old goat-tracks and some bones that

suggest wolves.

There is a pass through the mountains at the head of the third glacier.

Fine mountains stand at the head on each side. The one on the northeast

side is the higher and finer every way. It has three glaciers,

tributary to the third. The third glacier has altogether ten

tributaries, five on each side. The mountain on the left side of White

Glacier is about six thousand feet high. The moraines of Girdled

Glacier seem scarce to run anywhere. Only a little material is carried

to Berg Lake. Most of it seems to be at rest as a terminal on the main

glacier-field, which here has little motion. The curves of these last

as seen from this mountain-top are very beautiful.

It has been a glorious day, all pure sunshine. An hour or more before

sunset the distant mountains, a vast host, seemed more softly ethereal

than ever, pale blue, ineffably fine, all angles and harshness melted

off in the soft evening light. Even the snow and the grinding,

cascading glaciers became divinely tender and fine in this celestial

amethystine light. I got back to camp at 7.15, not tired. After my

hardtack supper I could have climbed the mountain again and got back

before sunrise, but dragging the sled tires me. I have been out on the

glacier examining a moraine-like mass about a third of a mile from

camp. It is perhaps a mile long, a hundred yards wide, and is thickly

strewn with wood. I think that it has been brought down the mountain by

a heavy snow avalanche, loaded on the ice, then carried away from the

shore in the direction of the flow of the glacier. This explains

detached moraine-masses. This one seems to have been derived from a big

roomy cirque or amphitheatre on the northwest side of this Snow Dome

Mountain.

To shorten the return journey I was tempted to glissade down what

appeared to be a snow-filled ravine, which was very steep. All went

well until I reached a bluish spot which proved to be ice, on which I

lost control of myself and rolled into a gravel talus at the foot

without a scratch. Just as I got up and was getting myself orientated,

I heard a loud fierce scream, uttered in an exulting, diabolical tone

of voice which startled me, as if an enemy, having seen me fall, was

glorying in my death. Then suddenly two ravens came swooping from the

sky and alighted on the jag of a rock within a few feet of me,

evidently hoping that I had been maimed and that they were going to

have a feast. But as they stared at me, studying my condition,

impatiently waiting for bone-picking time, I saw what they were up to

and shouted, “Not yet, not yet!”

_July 16_. At 7 A.M. I left camp to cross the main glacier. Six ravens

came to the camp as soon as I left. What wonderful eyes they must have!

Nothing that moves in all this icy wilderness escapes the eyes of these

brave birds. This is one of the loveliest mornings I ever saw in

Alaska; not a cloud or faintest hint of one in all the wide sky. There

is a yellowish haze in the east, white in the west, mild and mellow as

a Wisconsin Indian Summer, but finer, more ethereal, God’s holy light

making all divine.

In an hour or so I came to the confluence of the first of the seven

grand tributaries of the main Muir Glacier and had a glorious view of

it as it comes sweeping down in wild cascades from its magnificent,

pure white, mountain-girt basin to join the main crystal sea, its many

fountain peaks, clustered and crowded, all pouring forth their tribute

to swell its grand current. I crossed its front a little below its

confluence, where its shattered current, about two or three miles wide,

is reunited, and many rills and good-sized brooks glide gurgling and

ringing in pure blue channels, giving delightful animation to the icy

solitude.

Most of the ice-surface crossed to-day has been very uneven, and

hauling the sled and finding a way over hummocks has been fatiguing. At

times I had to lift the sled bodily and to cross many narrow,

nerve-trying, ice-sliver bridges, balancing astride of them, and

cautiously shoving the sled ahead of me with tremendous chasms on

either side. I had made perhaps not more than six or eight miles in a

straight line by six o’clock this evening when I reached ice so

hummocky and tedious I concluded to camp and not try to take the sled

any farther. I intend to leave it here in the middle of the basin and

carry my sleeping-bag and provisions the rest of the way across to the

west side. I am cozy and comfortable here resting in the midst of

glorious icy scenery, though very tired. I made out to get a cup of tea

by means of a few shavings and splinters whittled from the bottom board

of my sled, and made a fire in a little can, a small campfire, the

smallest I ever made or saw, yet it answered well enough as far as tea

was concerned. I crept into my sack before eight o’clock as the wind

was cold and my feet wet. One of my shoes is about worn out. I may have

to put on a wooden sole. This day has been cloudless throughout, with

lovely sunshine, a purple evening and morning. The circumference of

mountains beheld from the midst of this world of ice is marvelous, the

vast plain reposing in such soft tender light, the fountain mountains

so clearly cut, holding themselves aloft with their loads of ice in

supreme strength and beauty of architecture. I found a skull and most

of the other bones of a goat on the glacier about two miles from the

nearest land. It had probably been chased out of its mountain home by

wolves and devoured here. I carried its horns with me. I saw many

considerable depressions in the glacial surface, also a pitlike hole,

irregular, not like the ordinary wells along the slope of the many

small dirt-clad hillocks, faced to the south. Now the sun is down and

the sky is saffron yellow, blending and fading into purple around to

the south and north. It is a curious experience to be lying in bed

writing these notes, hummock waves rising in every direction, their

edges marking a multitude of crevasses and pits, while all around the

horizon rise peaks innumerable of most intricate style of architecture.

Solemnly growling and grinding moulins contrast with the sweet

low-voiced whispering and warbling of a network of rills, singing like

water-ouzels, glinting, gliding with indescribable softness and

sweetness of voice. They are all around, one within a few feet of my

hard sled bed.

_July 17_. Another glorious cloudless day is dawning in yellow and

purple and soon the sun over the eastern peak will blot out the blue

peak shadows and make all the vast white ice prairie sparkle. I slept

well last night in the middle of the icy sea. The wind was cold but my

sleeping-bag enabled me to lie neither warm nor intolerably cold. My

three-months cough is gone. Strange that with such work and exposure

one should know nothing of sore throats and of what are called colds.

My heavy, thick-soled shoes, resoled just before starting on the trip

six days ago, are about worn out and my feet have been wet every night.

But no harm comes of it, nothing but good. I succeeded in getting a

warm breakfast in bed. I reached over the edge of my sled, got hold of

a small cedar stick that I had been carrying, whittled a lot of thin

shavings from it, stored them on my breast, then set fire to a piece of

paper in a shallow tin can, added a pinch of shavings, held the cup of

water that always stood at my bedside over the tiny blaze with one

hand, and fed the fire by adding little pinches of shavings until the

water boiled, then pulling my bread sack within reach, made a good warm

breakfast, cooked and eaten in bed. Thus refreshed, I surveyed the

wilderness of crevassed, hummocky ice and concluded to try to drag my

little sled a mile or two farther, then, finding encouragement,

persevered, getting it across innumerable crevasses and streams and

around several lakes and over and through the midst of hummocks, and at

length reached the western shore between five and six o’clock this

evening, extremely fatigued. This I consider a hard job well done,

crossing so wildly broken a glacier, fifteen miles of it from Snow Dome

Mountain, in two days with a sled weighing altogether not less than a

hundred pounds. I found innumerable crevasses, some of them brimful of

water. I crossed in most places just where the ice was close pressed

and welded after descending cascades and was being shoved over an

upward slope, thus closing the crevasses at the bottom, leaving only

the upper sun-melted beveled portion open for water to collect in.

Vast must be the drainage from this great basin. The waste in sunshine

must be enormous, while in dark weather rains and winds also melt the

ice and add to the volume produced by the rain itself. The winds also,

though in temperature they may be only a degree or two above

freezing-point, dissolve the ice as fast, or perhaps faster, than clear

sunshine. Much of the water caught in tight crevasses doubtless freezes

during the winter and gives rise to many of the irregular veins seen in

the structure of the glacier. Saturated snow also freezes at times and

is incorporated with the ice, as only from the lower part of the

glacier is the snow melted during the summer. I have noticed many

traces of this action. One of the most beautiful things to be seen on

the glacier is the myriads of minute and intensely brilliant radiant

lights burning in rows on the banks of streams and pools and lakelets

from the tips of crystals melting in the sun, making them look as if

bordered with diamonds. These gems are rayed like stars and twinkle; no

diamond radiates keener or more brilliant light. It was perfectly

glorious to think of this divine light burning over all this vast

crystal sea in such ineffably fine effulgence, and over how many other

of icy Alaska’s glaciers where nobody sees it. To produce these effects

I fancy the ice must be melting rapidly, as it was being melted to-day.

The ice in these pools does not melt with anything like an even

surface, but in long branches and leaves, making fairy forests of

points, while minute bubbles of air are constantly being set free. I am

camped to-night on what I call Quarry Mountain from its raw, loose,

plantless condition, seven or eight miles above the front of the

glacier. I found enough fossil wood for tea. Glorious is the view to

the eastward from this camp. The sun has set, a few clouds appear, and

a torrent rushing down a gully and under the edge of the glacier is

making a solemn roaring. No tinkling, whistling rills this night. Ever

and anon I hear a falling boulder. I have had a glorious and

instructive day, but am excessively weary and to bed I go.

_July 18_. I felt tired this morning and meant to rest to-day. But

after breakfast at 8 A.M. I felt I must be up and doing, climbing,

sketching new views up the great tributaries from the top of Quarry

Mountain. Weariness vanished and I could have climbed, I think, five

thousand feet. Anything seems easy after sled-dragging over hummocks

and crevasses, and the constant nerve-strain in jumping crevasses so as

not to slip in making the spring. Quarry Mountain is the barest I have

seen, a raw quarry with infinite abundance of loose decaying granite

all on the go. Its slopes are excessively steep. A few patches of

epilobium make gay purple spots of color. Its seeds fly everywhere

seeking homes. Quarry Mountain is cut across into a series of parallel

ridges by oversweeping ice. It is still overswept in three places by

glacial flows a half to three quarters of a mile wide, finely arched at

the top of the divides. I have been sketching, though my eyes are much

inflamed and I can scarce see. All the lines I make appear double. I

fear I shall not be able to make the few more sketches I want

to-morrow, but must try. The day has been gloriously sunful, the

glacier pale yellow toward five o’clock. The hazy air, white with a

yellow tinge, gives an Indian-summerish effect. Now the blue evening

shadows are creeping out over the icy plain, some ten miles long, with

sunny yellow belts between them. Boulders fall now and again with dull,

blunt booming, and the gravel pebbles rattle.

_July 19_. Nearly blind. The light is intolerable and I fear I may be

long unfitted for work. I have been lying on my back all day with a

snow poultice bound over my eyes. Every object I try to look at seems

double; even the distant mountain-ranges are doubled, the upper an

exact copy of the lower, though somewhat faint. This is the first time

in Alaska that I have had too much sunshine. About four o’clock this

afternoon, when I was waiting for the evening shadows to enable me to

get nearer the main camp, where I could be more easily found in case my

eyes should become still more inflamed and I should be unable to

travel, thin clouds cast a grateful shade over all the glowing

landscape. I gladly took advantage of these kindly clouds to make an

effort to cross the few miles of the glacier that lay between me and

the shore of the inlet. I made a pair of goggles but am afraid to wear

them. Fortunately the ice here is but little broken, therefore I pulled

my cap well down and set off about five o’clock. I got on pretty well

and camped on the glacier in sight of the main camp, which from here in

a straight line is only five or six miles away. I went ashore on

Granite Island and gleaned a little fossil wood with which I made tea

on the ice.

_July 20_. I kept wet bandages on my eyes last night as long as I

could, and feel better this morning, but all the mountains still seem

to have double summits, giving a curiously unreal aspect to the

landscape. I packed everything on the sled and moved three miles

farther down the glacier, where I want to make measurements. Twice

to-day I was visited on the ice by a hummingbird, attracted by the red

lining of the bear-skin sleeping-bag.

I have gained some light on the formation of gravel-beds along the

inlet. The material is mostly sifted and sorted by successive railings

and washings along the margins of the glacier-tributaries, where the

supply is abundant beyond anything I ever saw elsewhere. The lowering

of the surface of a glacier when its walls are not too steep leaves a

part of the margin dead and buried and protected from the wasting

sunshine beneath the lateral moraines. Thus a marginal valley is

formed, clear ice on one side, or nearly so, buried ice on the other.

As melting goes on, the marginal trough, or valley, grows deeper and

wider, since both sides are being melted, the land side slower. The

dead, protected ice in melting first sheds off the large boulders, as

they are not able to lie on slopes where smaller ones can. Then the

next larger ones are rolled off, and pebbles and sand in succession.

Meanwhile this material is subjected to torrent-action, as if it were

cast into a trough. When floods come it is carried forward and

stratified, according to the force of the current, sand, mud, or larger

material. This exposes fresh surfaces of ice and melting goes on again,

until enough material has been undermined to form a veil in front; then

follows another washing and carrying-away and depositing where the

current is allowed to spread. In melting, protected margin terraces are

oftentimes formed. Perhaps these terraces mark successive heights of

the glacial surface. From terrace to terrace the grist of stone is

rolled and sifted. Some, meeting only feeble streams, have only the

fine particles carried away and deposited in smooth beds; others,

coarser, from swifter streams, overspread the fine beds, while many of

the large boulders no doubt roll back upon the glacier to go on their

travels again.

It has been cloudy mostly to-day, though sunny in the afternoon, and my

eyes are getting better. The steamer Queen is expected in a day or two,

so I must try to get down to the inlet to-morrow and make signal to

have some of the Reid party ferry me over. I must hear from home, write

letters, get rest and more to eat.

Near the front of the glacier the ice was perfectly free, apparently,

of anything like a crevasse, and in walking almost carelessly down it I

stopped opposite the large granite Nunatak Island, thinking that I

would there be partly sheltered from the wind. I had not gone a dozen

steps toward the island when I suddenly dropped into a concealed

water-filled crevasse, which on the surface showed not the slightest

sign of its existence. This crevasse like many others was being used as

the channel of a stream, and at some narrow point the small cubical

masses of ice into which the glacier surface disintegrates were jammed

and extended back farther and farther till they completely covered and

concealed the water. Into this I suddenly plunged, after crossing

thousands of really dangerous crevasses, but never before had I

encountered a danger so completely concealed. Down I plunged over head

and ears, but of course bobbed up again, and after a hard struggle

succeeded in dragging myself out over the farther side. Then I pulled

my sled over close to Nunatak cliff, made haste to strip off my

clothing, threw it in a sloppy heap and crept into my sleeping-bag to

shiver away the night as best I could.

_July 21_. Dressing this rainy morning was a miserable job, but might

have been worse. After wringing my sloppy underclothing, getting it on

was far from pleasant. My eyes are better and I feel no bad effect from

my icy bath. The last trace of my three months’ cough is gone. No

lowland grippe microbe could survive such experiences.

I have had a fine telling day examining the ruins of the old forest of

Sitka spruce that no great time ago grew in a shallow mud-filled basin

near the southwest corner of the glacier. The trees were protected by a

spur of the mountain that puts out here, and when the glacier advanced

they were simply flooded with fine sand and overborne. Stumps by the

hundred, three to fifteen feet high, rooted in a stream of fine blue

mud on cobbles, still have their bark on. A stratum of decomposed bark,

leaves, cones, and old trunks is still in place. Some of the stumps are

on rocky ridges of gravelly soil about one hundred and twenty-five feet

above the sea. The valley has been washed out by the stream now

occupying it, one of the glacier’s draining streams a mile long or more

and an eighth of a mile wide.

I got supper early and was just going to bed, when I was startled by

seeing a man coming across the moraine, Professor Reid, who had seen me

from the main camp and who came with Mr. Loomis and the cook in their

boat to ferry me over. I had not intended making signals for them until

to-morrow but was glad to go. I had been seen also by Mr. Case and one

of his companions, who were on the western mountain-side above the

fossil forest, shooting ptarmigans. I had a good rest and sleep and

leisure to find out how rich I was in new facts and pictures and how

tired and hungry I was.

Chapter XIX

Auroras

A few days later I set out with Professor Reid’s party to visit some of

the other large glaciers that flow into the bay, to observe what

changes have taken place in them since October, 1879, when I first

visited and sketched them. We found the upper half of the bay closely

choked with bergs, through which it was exceedingly difficult to force

a way. After slowly struggling a few miles up the east side, we dragged

the whale-boat and canoe over rough rocks into a fine garden and

comfortably camped for the night.

[Illustration: Floating Iceberg, Taku Inlet.]

The next day was spent in cautiously picking a way across to the west

side of the bay; and as the strangely scanty stock of provisions was

already about done, and the ice-jam to the northward seemed

impenetrable, the party decided to return to the main camp by a

comparatively open, roundabout way to the southward, while with the

canoe and a handful of food-scraps I pushed on northward. After a hard,

anxious struggle, I reached the mouth of the Hugh Miller fiord about

sundown, and tried to find a camp-spot on its steep, boulder-bound

shore. But no landing-place where it seemed possible to drag the canoe

above high-tide mark was discovered after examining a mile or more of

this dreary, forbidding barrier, and as night was closing down, I

decided to try to grope my way across the mouth of the fiord in the

starlight to an open sandy spot on which I had camped in October, 1879,

a distance of about three or four miles.

With the utmost caution I picked my way through the sparkling bergs,

and after an hour or two of this nerve-trying work, when I was perhaps

less than halfway across and dreading the loss of the frail canoe which

would include the loss of myself, I came to a pack of very large bergs

which loomed threateningly, offering no visible thoroughfare. Paddling

and pushing to right and left, I at last discovered a sheer-walled

opening about four feet wide and perhaps two hundred feet long, formed

apparently by the splitting of a huge iceberg. I hesitated to enter

this passage, fearing that the slightest change in the tide-current

might close it, but ventured nevertheless, judging that the dangers

ahead might not be greater than those I had already passed. When I had

got about a third of the way in, I suddenly discovered that the

smooth-walled ice-lane was growing narrower, and with desperate haste

backed out. Just as the bow of the canoe cleared the sheer walls they

came together with a growling crunch. Terror-stricken, I turned back,

and in an anxious hour or two gladly reached the rock-bound shore that

had at first repelled me, determined to stay on guard all night in the

canoe or find some place where with the strength that comes in a fight

for life I could drag it up the boulder wall beyond ice danger. This at

last was happily done about midnight, and with no thought of sleep I

went to bed rejoicing.

My bed was two boulders, and as I lay wedged and bent on their

up-bulging sides, beguiling the hard, cold time in gazing into the

starry sky and across the sparkling bay, magnificent upright bars of

light in bright prismatic colors suddenly appeared, marching swiftly in

close succession along the northern horizon from west to east as if in

diligent haste, an auroral display very different from any I had ever

before beheld. Once long ago in Wisconsin I saw the heavens draped in

rich purple auroral clouds fringed and folded in most magnificent

forms; but in this glory of light, so pure, so bright, so enthusiastic

in motion, there was nothing in the least cloud-like. The short

color-bars, apparently about two degrees in height, though blending,

seemed to be as well defined as those of the solar spectrum.

How long these glad, eager soldiers of light held on their way I cannot

tell; for sense of time was charmed out of mind and the blessed night

circled away in measureless rejoicing enthusiasm.

In the early morning after so inspiring a night I launched my canoe

feeling able for anything, crossed the mouth of the Hugh Miller fiord,

and forced a way three or four miles along the shore of the bay, hoping

to reach the Grand Pacific Glacier in front of Mt. Fairweather. But the

farther I went, the ice-pack, instead of showing inviting little open

streaks here and there, became so much harder jammed that on some parts

of the shore the bergs, drifting south with the tide, were shoving one

another out of the water beyond high-tide line. Farther progress to

northward was thus rigidly stopped, and now I had to fight for a way

back to my cabin, hoping that by good tide luck I might reach it before

dark. But at sundown I was less than half-way home, and though very

hungry was glad to land on a little rock island with a smooth beach for

the canoe and a thicket of alder bushes for fire and bed and a little

sleep. But shortly after sundown, while these arrangements were being

made, lo and behold another aurora enriching the heavens! and though it

proved to be one of the ordinary almost colorless kind, thrusting long,

quivering lances toward the zenith from a dark cloudlike base, after

last night’s wonderful display one’s expectations might well be

extravagant and I lay wide awake watching.

On the third night I reached my cabin and food. Professor Reid and his

party came in to talk over the results of our excursions, and just as

the last one of the visitors opened the door after bidding good-night,

he shouted, “Muir, come look here. Here’s something fine.”

I ran out in auroral excitement, and sure enough here was another

aurora, as novel and wonderful as the marching rainbow-colored

columns—a glowing silver bow spanning the Muir Inlet in a magnificent

arch right under the zenith, or a little to the south of it, the ends

resting on the top of the mountain-walls. And though colorless and

steadfast, its intense, solid, white splendor, noble proportions, and

fineness of finish excited boundless admiration. In form and proportion

it was like a rainbow, a bridge of one span five miles wide; and so

brilliant, so fine and solid and homogeneous in every part, I fancy

that if all the stars were raked together into one windrow, fused and

welded and run through some celestial rolling-mill, all would be

required to make this one glowing white colossal bridge.

After my last visitor went to bed, I lay down on the moraine in front

of the cabin and gazed and watched. Hour after hour the wonderful arch

stood perfectly motionless, sharply defined and substantial-looking as

if it were a permanent addition to the furniture of the sky. At length

while it yet spanned the inlet in serene unchanging splendor, a band of

fluffy, pale gray, quivering ringlets came suddenly all in a row over

the eastern mountain-top, glided in nervous haste up and down the under

side of the bow and over the western mountain-wall. They were about one

and a half times the apparent diameter of the bow in length, maintained

a vertical posture all the way across, and slipped swiftly along as if

they were suspended like a curtain on rings. Had these lively auroral

fairies marched across the fiord on the top of the bow instead of

shuffling along the under side of it, one might have fancied they were

a happy band of spirit people on a journey making use of the splendid

bow for a bridge. There must have been hundreds of miles of them; for

the time required for each to cross from one end of the bridge to the

other seemed only a minute or less, while nearly an hour elapsed from

their first appearance until the last of the rushing throng vanished

behind the western mountain, leaving the bridge as bright and solid and

steadfast as before they arrived. But later, half an hour or so, it

began to fade. Fissures or cracks crossed it diagonally through which a

few stars were seen, and gradually it became thin and nebulous until it

looked like the Milky Way, and at last vanished, leaving no visible

monument of any sort to mark its place.

I now returned to my cabin, replenished the fire, warmed myself, and

prepared to go to bed, though too aurorally rich and happy to go to

sleep. But just as I was about to retire, I thought I had better take

another look at the sky, to make sure that the glorious show was over;

and, contrary to all reasonable expectations, I found that the pale

foundation for another bow was being laid right overhead like the

first. Then losing all thought of sleep, I ran back to my cabin,

carried out blankets and lay down on the moraine to keep watch until

daybreak, that none of the sky wonders of the glorious night within

reach of my eyes might be lost.

I had seen the first bow when it stood complete in full splendor, and

its gradual fading decay. Now I was to see the building of a new one

from the beginning. Perhaps in less than half an hour the silvery

material was gathered, condensed, and welded into a glowing, evenly

proportioned arc like the first and in the same part of the sky. Then

in due time over the eastern mountain-wall came another throng of

restless electric auroral fairies, the infinitely fine pale-gray

garments of each lightly touching those of their neighbors as they

swept swiftly along the under side of the bridge and down over the

western mountain like the merry band that had gone the same way before

them, all keeping quivery step and time to music too fine for mortal

ears.

While the gay throng was gliding swiftly along, I watched the bridge

for any change they might make upon it, but not the slightest could I

detect. They left no visible track, and after all had passed the

glowing arc stood firm and apparently immutable, but at last faded

slowly away like its glorious predecessor.

Excepting only the vast purple aurora mentioned above, said to have

been visible over nearly all the continent, these two silver bows in

supreme, serene, supernal beauty surpassed everything auroral I ever

beheld.

Glossary of Words in the Chinook Jargon

_Boston_: English.

_Chuck_: Water, stream.

_Deliat_: Very, _or_ very good.

_Friday_: Shoreward.

_Hi yu_: A great quantity of, plenty of.

_Hootchenoo_: A native liquor. _See page 202_.

_Hyas_: Big, very.

_Klosh_: Good.

_Kumtux_: Know, understand.

_Mika_: You, your (_singular_).

_Muck-a-muck_: Food.

_Poogh_: Shoot, shooting.

_Sagh-a-ya_: How do you do?

_Skookum_: Strong.

_Skookum-house_: Jail.

_Tillicum_: Friend.

_Tola_: Lead (_verb_).

_Tucktay_: Seaward.

_Tumtum_: Mind, heart.

_Wawa_: Talk (_noun or verb_).