THE MULDROW GLACIER
Right opposite McPhee Pass, across the glacier, perhaps at this point
half a mile wide, rises a bold pyramidal peak, twelve thousand or
thirteen thousand feet high, which we would like to name Mount Farthing,
in honor of the memory of a very noble gentlewoman who died at the
mission at Nenana three years ago, unless, unknown to us, it already
bear some other name.[1] Walter and our two Indian boys had been under
her instruction.
At the base of this peak two branches of the glacier unite, coming down
in the same general direction and together draining the snows of the
whole eastern face of the mountain. The dividing wall between them,
almost up to their head and termination, is one stupendous, well-nigh
vertical escarpment of ice-covered rock towering six thousand or seven
thousand feet above the glacier floor, the first of the very impressive
features of the mountain. The other wall of the glacier, through a
breach in which we reached its surface--the right-hand wall as we
journeyed up it--consists of a series of inaccessible cliffs deeply
seamed with snow gullies and crusted here and there with hanging
glaciers, the rock formation changing several times as one proceeds but
maintaining an unbroken rampart.
Now, it is important to remember that these two ridges which make the
walls of the Muldrow Glacier rise ultimately to the two summits of the
mountain, the right-hand wall culminating in the North Peak and the
left-hand wall in the South Peak. And the glacier lies between the walls
all the way up and separates the summits, with this qualification--that
midway in its course it is interrupted by a perpendicular ice-fall of
about four thousand feet by which its upper portion discharges into its
lower. It will help the reader to a comprehension of the ascent if this
rough sketch be borne in mind.
[Illustration: The Muldrow Glacier. Karstens in the foreground.]
The course of the glacier at the point at which we reached it is nearly
northeast and southwest (magnetic); its surface is almost level and it
is free of crevasses save at its sides. For three or four miles above
the pass it pursues its course without change of direction or much
increase in grade; then it takes a broad sweep toward the south and
grows steep and much crevassed. Three miles farther up it takes another
and more decided southerly bend, receiving two steep but short
tributaries from the northwest at an elevation of about ten thousand
feet, and finishing its lower course in another mile and a half, at an
elevation of about eleven thousand five hundred feet, with an almost due
north and south direction (magnetic).
A week after our first sight of the glacier, or on the 18th April, we
were camped at about the farthest point we had been able to see on that
occasion--just round the first bend. Our stuff had been freighted to the
pass and cached there; then, in the usual method of our advance, the
camp had been moved forward beyond the cache on to the glacier, a full
day's march. Then the team worked backward, bringing up the stuff to the
new camp. Thus three could go ahead, prospecting and staking out a trail
for further advance, while two worked with the dog team at the
freighting.
[Sidenote: Crevasses]
For the glacier difficulties now confronted us in the fullest degree.
Immediately above our tent the ice rose steeply a couple of hundred
feet, and at that level began to be most intricately crevassed. It took
several days to unravel the tangle of fissures and discover and prepare
a trail that the dogs could haul the sleds along. Sometimes a bridge
would be found over against one wall of the glacier, and for the next we
might have to go clear across to the other wall. Sometimes a block of
ice jammed in the jaws of a crevasse would make a perfectly safe bridge;
sometimes we had nothing upon which to cross save hardened snow. Some of
the gaps were narrow and some wide, yawning chasms. Some of them were
mere surface cracks and some gave hundreds of feet of deep blue ice with
no bottom visible at all. Sometimes there was no natural bridge over a
crevasse, and then, choosing the narrowest and shallowest place in it,
we made a bridge, excavating blocks of hard snow with the shovels and
building them up from a ledge below, or projecting them on the
cantilever principle, one beyond the other from both sides. Many of
these crevasses could be jumped across by an unencumbered man on his
snow-shoes that could not have been jumped with a pack and that the dogs
could not cross at all. As each section of trail was determined it was
staked out with willow shoots, hundreds of which had been brought up
from below. And in all of this pioneering work, and, indeed,
thenceforward invariably, the rope was conscientiously used. Every step
of the way up the glacier was sounded by a long pole, the man in the
lead thrusting it deep into the snow while the two behind kept the rope
always taut. More than one pole slipped into a hidden crevasse and was
lost when vigor of thrust was not matched by tenacity of grip; more than
once a man was jerked back just as the snow gave way beneath his feet.
The open crevasses were not the dangerous ones; the whole glacier was
crisscrossed by crevasses completely covered with snow. In bright
weather it was often possible to detect them by a slight depression in
the surface or by a faint, shadowy difference in tint, but in the
half-light of cloudy and misty weather these signs failed, and there was
no safety but in the ceaseless prodding of the pole. The ice-axe will
not serve--one cannot reach far enough forward with it for safety, and
the incessant stooping is an unnecessary added fatigue.
[Sidenote: Heavy Hauling]
For the transportation of our wood and supplies beyond the first glacier
camp, the team of six dogs was cut into two teams of three, each drawing
a little Yukon sled procured in the Kantishna, the large basket sled
having been abandoned. And in the movement forward, when the trail to a
convenient cache had been established, two men, roped together,
accompanied each sled, one ahead of the dogs, the other just behind the
dogs at the gee-pole. This latter had also a hauling-line looped about
his breast, so that men and dogs and sled made a unit. It took the
combined traction power of men and dogs to take the loads up the steep
glacial ascents, and it was very hard work. Once, "Snowball," the
faithful team leader of four years past, who has helped to haul my sled
nearly ten thousand miles, broke through a snow bridge and, the
belly-band parting, slipped out of his collar and fell some twenty feet
below to a ledge in a crevasse. Walter was let down and rescued the poor
brute, trembling but uninjured. Without the dogs we should have been
much delayed and could hardly, one judges, have moved the wood forward
at all. The work on the glacier was the beginning of the ceaseless grind
which the ascent of Denali demands.
[Illustration: Ascension Day, 1913.]
How intolerably hot it was, on some of these days, relaying the stuff up
the glacier! I shall never forget Ascension Day, which occurred this
year on the 1st May. Double feast as it was--for SS. Philip and James
falls on that day--it was a day of toil and penance. With the mercurial
barometer and a heavy pack of instruments and cameras and films on my
back and the rope over my shoulder, bent double hauling at the sled, I
trudged along all day, panting and sweating, through four or five inches
of new-fallen snow, while the glare of the sun was terrific. It seemed
impossible that, surrounded entirely by ice and snow, with millions of
tons of ice underfoot, it _could_ be so hot. But we took the loads right
through to the head of the glacier that day, rising some four thousand
feet in the course of five miles, and cached them there. On other days a
smother of mist lay all over the glacier surface, with never a breath of
wind, and the air seemed warm and humid as in an Atlantic coast city in
July. Yet again, starting early in the morning, sometimes a zero
temperature nipped toes and fingers and a keen wind cut like a knife.
Sometimes it was bitterly cold in the mornings, insufferably hot at
noon, and again bitterly cold toward night. It was a pity we had no
black-bulb, sun-maximum thermometer amongst our instruments, for one is
sure its readings would have been of great interest.
It was a pity, also, that we had no means of making an attempt at
measuring the rate of movement of this glacier--a subject we often
discussed. The carriage of poles enough to set out rows of them across
the glacier would have greatly increased our loads and the time required
to transport them. But it is certain that its rate of movement is very
slow in general, though faster at certain spots than at others, and a
reason for this judgment will be given later.
[Illustration: Bridging a crevasse on the Muldrow Glacier.]
[Sidenote: The Fire on the Glacier]
The midway cache between our first and last glacier camps was itself the
scene of a camp we had not designed, for on the day we were moving
finally forward we were too fatigued to press on to the spot that had
been selected at the head of the glacier, and by common consent made a
halt at the cache and set up the tent there. This is mentioned because
it had consequences. If we had gone through that day and had established
ourselves at the selected spot, a disaster that befell us would, in all
probability, not have happened; for the next day, instead of moving our
camp forward, we relayed some stuff and cached it where the camp would
be made, covering the cache with the three small silk tents. Then we sat
around awhile and ate our luncheon, and presently went down for another
load. Imagine our surprise, upon returning some hours later, to see a
column of smoke rising from our cache. All sorts of wild speculations
flew through the writer's mind as, in the lead that day, he first
crested the sérac that gave view of the cache. Had some mysterious
climber come over from the other side of the mountain and built a fire
on the glacier? Had he discovered our wood and our grub and, perhaps
starving, kindled a fire of the one to cook the other? Was there really,
then, some access to this face of the mountain from the south? For it is
fixed in the mind of the traveller in the north beyond eradication that
_smoke_ must mean _man_. But ere we had gone much farther the truth
dawned upon us that our cache was on fire, and we left the dogs and the
sleds and hurried to the spot. Something we were able to save, but not
much, though we were in time to prevent the fire from spreading to our
far-hauled wood. And the explanation was not far to seek. After luncheon
Karstens and the writer had smoked their pipes, and one or the other had
thrown a careless match away that had fallen unextinguished upon the
silk tents that covered the cache. Presently a little wind had fanned
the smouldering fabric into flame, which had eaten down into the pile of
stuff below, mostly in wooden cases. All our sugar was gone, all our
powdered milk, all our baking-powder, our prunes, raisins, and dried
apples, most of our tobacco, a case of pilot bread, a sack full of
woollen socks and gloves, another sack full of photographic films--all
were burned. Most fortunately, the food provided especially for the
high-mountain work had not yet been taken to the cache, and our
pemmican, erbswurst, chocolate, compressed tea, and figs were safe. But
it was a great blow to us and involved considerable delay at a very
unfortunate time. We felt mortification at our carelessness as keenly as
we felt regret at our loss. The last thing a newcomer would dream of
would be danger from fire on a glacier, but we were not newcomers, and
we all knew how ever-present that danger is, more imminent in Alaska in
winter than in summer. Our carelessness had brought us nigh to the
ruining of the whole expedition. The loss of the films was especially
unfortunate, for we were thus reduced to Walter's small camera with a
common lens and the six or eight spools of film he had for it.
[Illustration: Hard work for dogs as well as men on the Muldrow
Glacier.]
[Sidenote: Camping Comfort]
The next day the final move of the main camp was made, and we
established ourselves in the cirque at the head of the Muldrow Glacier,
at an elevation of about eleven thousand five hundred feet, more than
half-way up the mountain. After digging a level place in the glacier and
setting up the tent, a wall of snow blocks was built all round it, and a
little house of snow blocks, a regular Eskimo igloo, was built near by
to serve as a cache. Some details of our camping may be of interest. The
damp from the glacier ice had incommoded us at previous camps, coming up
through skins and bedding when the tent grew warm. So at this camp we
took further precaution. The boxes in which our grub had been hauled
were broken up and laid over the whole portion of the floor of the tent
where our bed was; over this wooden floor a canvas cover was laid, and
upon this the sun-dried hides of the caribou and mountain-sheep we had
killed were placed. There was thus a dry bottom for our bedding, and we
were not much troubled thenceforward by the rising moisture, although a
camp upon the ice is naturally always a more or less sloppy place. The
hides were invaluable; heavy as they were, we carried them all the way
up.
So soon as we were thus securely lodged, elated when we thought of our
advance, but downcast when we recalled our losses, we set ourselves to
repair the damage of the fire so far as it was reparable. Walter and
Johnny must go all the way down to the base camp and bring up
sled-covers out of which to construct tents, must hunt the baggage
through for old socks and mitts, and must draw upon what grub had been
left for the return journey to the extreme limit it was safe to do so.
Karstens, accustomed to be clean-shaven, had been troubled since our
first glacier camp with an affection of the face which he attributed to
"ingrowing whiskers," but when many hairs had been plucked out with the
tweezers and he was nothing bettered, but rather grew worse and the
inflammation spread to neck and temple, it was more correctly attributed
to an eczema, or tetter, caused by the glare of the sun. So he was not
loath to seclude himself for a few days in the tent while we set about
the making of socks and mitts from the camel's-hair lining of the
sleeping-bag. Walter's face was also very sore from the sun, his lips in
particular being swollen and blistered. So painful did they become that
I had to cut lip covers of surgeon's plaster to protect them. Then the
boys returned with the sorry gleanings of the base camp, and the
business of making two tents from the soiled and torn sled-covers and
darning worn-out socks and mittens, was put in hand. Our camp looked
like a sweat-shop those days, with its cross-legged tailormen and its
litter of snippets. In addition to the six-by-seven tent, three feet six
inches high, in which we were to live when we left the glacier, we made
a small, conical tent in which to read the instruments on the summit.
And all those days the sun shone in a clear sky!
[Sidenote: Amber Glasses]
Here, since reference has just been made to the effect of the sun's
glare on the face of one member of the party, it may be in place to
speak of the perfect eye protection which the amber snow-glasses
afforded us. Long experience with blue and smoke-colored glasses upon
the trail in spring had led us to expect much irritation of the eyes
despite the use of snow-glasses, and we had plentifully provided
ourselves with boracic acid and zinc sulphate for eye-washes. But the
amber glasses, with their yellow celluloid side-pieces, were not a mere
palliative, as all other glasses had been in our experience, but a
complete preventive of snow-blindness. No one of us had the slightest
trouble with the eyes, and the eye-washes were never used. It is hard
for any save men compelled every spring to travel over the dazzling
snows to realize what a great boon this newly discovered amber glass is.
There is no reason anywhere for any more snow-blindness, and there is no
use anywhere for any more blue or smoked glasses. The invention of the
amber snow-glass is an even greater blessing to the traveller in the
north than the invention of the thermos bottle. No test could be more
severe than that which we put these glasses to.
We were now at the farthest point at which it was possible to use the
dogs, at our actual climbing base, and the time had come for Johnny and
the dogs to go down to the base camp for good. We should have liked to
keep the boy, so good-natured and amiable he was and so keen for further
climbing; but the dogs must be tended, and the main food for them was
yet to seek on the foot-hills with the rifle. So on 9th May down they
went, Tatum and the writer escorting them with the rope past the
crevasses as far as the first glacier camp, and then toiling slowly up
the glacier again, thankful that it was for the last time. That was one
of the sultriest and most sweltering days either of us ever remembered,
a moist heat of sun beating down through vapor, with never a breath of
breeze--a stifling, stewing day that, with the steep climb added,
completely exhausted and prostrated us.
[Sidenote: The Great Ice-Fall]
It is important that the reader should be able to see, in his mind's
eye, the situation of our camp at the head of the glacier, because to do
so is to grasp the simple orography of this face of the mountain, and to
understand the route of its ascent, probably the only route by which it
can be ascended. Standing beside the tent, facing in the direction we
have journeyed, the great highway of the glacier comes to an abrupt end,
a cul-de-sac. On the right hand the wall of the glacier towers up, with
enormous precipitous cliffs incrusted with hanging ice, to the North
Peak of the mountain, eight or nine thousand feet above us. About at
right angles to the end of the glacier, and four thousand feet above it,
is another glacier, which discharges by an almost perpendicular ice-fall
upon the floor of the glacier below.[2] The left-hand wall of the
glacier, described some pages back as a stupendous escarpment of
ice-covered rock, breaks rapidly down into a comparatively low ridge,
which sweeps to the right, encloses the head of the glacier, and then
rises rapidly to the glacier above, and still rises to form the
left-hand wall of that glacier, and finally the southern or higher peak
of the mountain.
So the upper glacier separates the two great peaks of the mountain and
discharges at right angles into the lower glacier. And the walls of the
lower glacier sweep around and rise to form the walls of the upper
glacier, and ultimately the summits of the mountain. To reach the peaks
one must first reach the upper glacier, and the southern or left-hand
wall of the lower glacier, where it breaks down into the ridge that
encloses the head of the glacier, is the only possible means by which
the upper basin may be reached. This ridge, then, called by Parker and
Browne the Northeast Ridge (and we have kept that designation, though
with some doubt as to its correctness), presented itself as the next
stage in our climb.
[Sidenote: Last Year's Earthquake]
Now just before leaving Fairbanks we had received a copy of a magazine
containing the account of the Parker-Browne climb, and in that narrative
Mr. Browne speaks of this Northeast Ridge as "a steep but practicable
snow slope," and prints a photograph which shows it as such. To our
surprise, when we first reached the head of the glacier, the ridge
offered no resemblance whatever to the description or the photograph.
The upper one-third of it was indeed as described, but at that point
there was a sudden sharp cleavage, and all below was a jumbled mass of
blocks of ice and rock in all manner of positions, with here a pinnacle
and there a great gap. Moreover, the floor of the glacier at its head
was strewn with enormous icebergs that we could not understand at all.
All at once the explanation came to us--"the earthquake"! The
Parker-Browne party had reported an earthquake which shook the whole
base of the mountain on 6th July, 1912, two days after they had come
down, and, as was learned later, the seismographic instruments at
Washington recorded it as the most severe shock since the San Francisco
disturbance of 1906. There could be no doubt that the earthquake had
disrupted this ridge. The huge bergs all around us were not the normal
discharge of hanging glaciers as we had at first wonderingly supposed;
they were the incrustation of ages, maybe, ripped off the rocks and
hurled down from the ridge by this convulsion. It was as though, as soon
as the Parker-Browne party reached the foot of the mountain, the ladder
by which they had ascended and descended was broken up.
[Illustration: The Northeast Ridge shattered by the earthquake in July,
1912.
The earthquake cleavage is plainly shown half-way down the ridge in the
background. The Browne Tower is the uppermost point in the picture. The
Parker Pass is along its base.]
What a wonderful providential escape these three men, Parker, Browne,
and La Voy had! They reached a spot within three or four hundred feet of
the top of the mountain, struggling gallantly against a blizzard, but
were compelled at last to beat a retreat. Again from their
seventeen-thousand-foot camp they essayed it, only to be enshrouded and
defeated by dense mist. They would have waited in their camp for fair
weather had they been provided with food, but their stomachs would not
retain the canned pemmican they had carried laboriously aloft, and they
were compelled to give up the attempt and descend. So down to the foot
of the mountain they went, and immediately they reached their base camp
this awful earthquake shattered the ridge and showered down bergs on
both the upper and lower glaciers. Had their food served they had
certainly remained above, and had they remained above their bodies would
be there now. Even could they have escaped the avalanching icebergs they
could never have descended that ridge after the earthquake. They would
either have been overwhelmed and crushed to death instantly or have
perished by starvation. One cannot conceive grander burial than that
which lofty mountains bend and crack and shatter to make, or a nobler
tomb than the great upper basin of Denali; but life is sweet and all men
are loath to leave it, and certainly never men who cling to life had
more cause to be thankful.
The difficulty of our task was very greatly increased; that was plain at
a glance. This ridge, that the pioneer climbers of 1910 went up at one
march with climbing-irons strapped beneath their moccasins, carrying
nothing but their flagpole, that the Parker-Browne party surmounted in a
few days, relaying their camping stuff and supplies, was to occupy us
for three weeks while we hewed a staircase three miles long in the
shattered ice.
[Sidenote: Glacier Movement]
It was the realization of the earthquake and of what it had done that
convinced us that this Muldrow Glacier has a very slow rate of movement.
The great blocks of ice hurled down from above lay apparently just where
they had fallen almost a year before. At the points of sharp descent, at
the turns in its course, at the points where tributary glaciers were
received, the movement is somewhat more rapid. We saw some crevasses
upon our descent that were not in existence when we went up. But for the
whole stretch of it we were satisfied that a very few feet a year would
cover its movement. No doubt all the glaciers on this side of the range
are much more sluggish than on the other side, where the great
precipitation of snow takes place.
We told Johnny to look for us in two weeks. It was thirty-one days ere
we rejoined him. For now began the period of suspense, of hope blasted
anew nearly every morning, the period of weary waiting for decent
weather. With the whole mountain and glacier enveloped in thick mist it
was not possible to do anything up above, and day after day this was the
condition, varied by high wind and heavy snow. From the inexhaustible
cisterns of the Pacific Ocean that vapor was distilled, and ever it rose
to these mountains and poured all over them until every valley, every
glacier, every hollow, was filled to overflowing. There seemed sometimes
to us no reason why the process should not go on forever. The situation
was not without its ludicrous side, when one had the grace to see it.
Here were four men who had already passed through the long Alaskan
winter, and now, when the rivers were breaking and the trees bursting
into leaf, the flowers spangling every hillside, they were deliberately
pushing themselves up into the winter still, with the long-expected
summer but a day's march away.
The tedium of lying in that camp while snow-storm or fierce, high wind
forbade adventure upon the splintered ridge was not so great to the
writer as to some of the other members of the expedition, for there was
always Walter's education to be prosecuted, as it had been prosecuted
for three winters on the trail and three summers on the launch, in a
desultory but not altogether unsuccessful manner. An hour or two spent
in writing from dictation, another hour or two in reading aloud, a
little geography and a little history and a little physics made the day
pass busily. A pupil is a great resource. Karstens was continually
designing and redesigning a motor-boat in which one engine should
satisfactorily operate twin screws; Tatum learned the thirty-nine
articles by heart; but naval architecture and even controversial
divinity palled after a while. The equipment and the supplies for the
higher region were gone over again and again, to see that all was
properly packed and in due proportion.
[Sidenote: The Language of Commerce]
[Sidenote: "Talcum and Glucose"]
As one handled the packages and read and reread the labels, one was
struck by the meagre English of merchandisers and the poor verbal
resources of commerce generally. A while ago business dealt hardly with
the word "proposition." It was the universal noun. Everything that
business touched, however remotely, was a "proposition." When last he
was "outside" the writer heard the Nicene creed described as a "tough
proposition"; the Vice-President of the United States as a "cold-blooded
proposition," and missionaries in Alaska generally as "queer
propositions." Now commerce has discovered and appropriated the word
"product" and is working it for all it is worth. The coffee in the can
calls itself a product. The compressed medicines from London direct you
to "dissolve one product" in so much water; the vacuum bottles inform
you that since they are a "glass product" they will not guarantee
themselves against breakage; the tea tablets and the condensed pea soup
affirm the purity of "these products"; the powdered milk is a little
more explicit and calls itself a "food product." One feels disposed to
agree with Humpty Dumpty, in "Through the Looking-Glass," that when a
word is worked as hard as this it ought to be paid extra. One feels that
"product" ought to be coming round on Saturday night to collect its
overtime. The zwieback amuses one; it is a West-coast "product," and
apparently "product" has not yet reached the West coast--it does not so
dignify itself. But it urges one, in great letters on every package, to
"save the end seals; they are valuable!" Walter finds that by gathering
one thousand two hundred of these seals he would be entitled to a
"rolled-gold" watch absolutely free! This zwieback was the whole stock
of a Yukon grocer purchased when the supply we ordered did not arrive.
The writer was reminded of the time when he bought several two-pound
packages of rolled oats at a little Yukon store and discovered to his
disgust that every package contained a china cup and saucer that must
have weighed at least a pound. One can understand the poor Indian being
thus deluded into the belief that he is getting his crockery for
nothing, but it is hard to understand how the "gift-enterprise" and
"premium-package" folly still survives amongst white people--and Indians
do not eat zwieback. What sort of people are they who will feverishly
purchase and consume one thousand two hundred packages of zwieback in
order to get a "rolled-gold" watch for nothing? A sack of corn-meal
takes one's eye mainly by the enumeration of the formidable processes
which the "product" inside has survived. It is announced proudly as
"degerminated, granulated, double kiln-dried, steam-ground"! But why, in
the name even of an adulterous and adulterating generation, should rice
be "coated with talcum and glucose," as this sack unblushingly
confesses? It is all very well to add "remove by washing"; that is
precisely what we shall be unable to do. It will take all the time and
fuel we have to spare to melt snow for cooking, when one little primus
stove serves for all purposes. When we leave this camp there will be no
more water for the toilet; we shall have to cleanse our hands with snow
and let our faces go. The rice will enter the pot unwashed and will
transfer its talcum and glucose to our intestines. Nor is this the case
merely on exceptional mountain-climbing expeditions; it is the general
rule during the winter throughout Alaska. It takes a long time and a
great deal of snow and much wood to produce a pot of water on the winter
trail. That "talcum-and-glucose" abomination should be taken up by the
Pure Food Law authorities. All the rice that comes to Alaska is so
labelled. The stomachs and bowels of dogs and men in the country are
doubtless gradually becoming "coated with talcum and glucose."
[Sidenote: Sugar]
It was during this period of hope deferred that we began to be entirely
without sugar. Perhaps by the ordinary man anywhere, certainly by the
ordinary man in Alaska, where it is the rule to include as much sugar as
flour in an outfit, deprivation of sugar is felt more keenly than
deprivation of any other article of food. We watched the gradual
dwindling of our little sack, replenished from the base camp with the
few pounds we had reserved for our return journey, with sinking hearts.
It was kept solely for tea and coffee. We put no more in the sour dough
for hot cakes; we ceased its use on our rice for breakfast; we gave up
all sweet messes. Tatum attempted a pudding without sugar, putting
vanilla and cinnamon and one knows not what other flavorings in it, in
the hope of disguising the absence of sweetness, but no one could eat it
and there was much jeering at the cook. Still it dwindled and dwindled.
Two spoonfuls to a cup were reduced by common consent to one, and still
it went, until at last the day came when there was no more. Our cocoa
became useless--we could not drink it without sugar; our consumption of
tea and coffee diminished--there was little demand for the second cup.
And we all began to long for sweet things. We tried to make a palatable
potation from some of our milk chocolate, reserved for the higher work
and labelled, "For eating only." The label was accurate; it made a
miserable drink, the milk taste entirely lacking, the sweetness almost
gone. We speculated how our ancestors got on without sugar when it was a
high-priced luxury brought painfully in small quantities from the
Orient, and assured one another that it was not a necessary article of
diet. At last we all agreed to Karstens's laconic advice, "Forget it!"
and we spoke of sugar no more. When we got on the ridge the chocolate
satisfied to some extent the craving for sweetness, but we all missed
the sugar sorely and continued to miss it to the end, Karstens as much
as anybody else.
Our long detention here made us thankful for the large tent and the
plentiful wood supply. That wood had been hauled twenty miles and raised
nearly ten thousand feet, but it was worth while since it enabled us to
"weather out the weather" here in warmth and comparative comfort. The
wood no more than served our need; indeed, we had begun to economize
closely before we left this camp.
We were greatly interested and surprised at the intrusion of animal life
into these regions totally devoid of any vegetation. A rabbit followed
us up the glacier to an elevation of ten thousand feet, gnawing the bark
from the willow shoots with which the trail was staked, creeping round
the crevasses, and, in one place at least, leaping such a gap. At ten
thousand feet he turned back and descended, leaving his tracks plain in
the snow. We speculated as to what possible object he could have had,
and decided that he was migrating from the valley below, overstocked
with rabbits as it was, and had taken a wrong direction for his purpose.
Unless the ambition for first ascents have reached the leporidæ, this
seems the only explanation.
At this camp at the head of the glacier we saw ptarmigan on several
occasions, and heard their unmistakable cry on several more, and once we
felt sure that a covey passed over the ridge above us and descended to
the other glacier. It was always in thick weather that these birds were
noticed at the glacier head, and we surmised that perhaps they had lost
their way in the cloud.
But even this was not the greatest height at which bird life was
encountered. In the Grand Basin, at sixteen thousand five hundred feet,
Walter was certain that he heard the twittering of small birds familiar
throughout the winter in Alaska, and this also was in the mist. I have
never known the boy make a mistake in such matters, and it is not
essentially improbable. Doctor Workman saw a pair of choughs at
twenty-one thousand feet, on Nun Kun in the Himalayas.
[Sidenote: Avalanches]
Our situation on the glacier floor, much of the time enveloped in dense
mist, was damp and cold and gloomy. The cliffs around from time to time
discharged their unstable snows in avalanches that threw clouds of snow
almost across the wide glacier. Often we could see nothing, and the
noise of the avalanches without the sight of them was at times a little
alarming. But the most notable discharges were those from the great
ice-fall, and the more important of them were startling and really very
grand sights. A slight movement would begin along the side of the ice,
in one of the gullies of the rock, a little trickling and rattling.
Gathering to itself volume as it descended, it started ice in other
gullies and presently there was a roar from the whole face of the
enormous hanging glacier, and the floor upon which the precipitation
descended trembled and shook with the impact of the discharge. Dense
volumes of snow and ice dust rose in clouds thousands of feet high and
slowly drifted down the glacier. We had chosen our camping-place to be
out of harm's way and were really quite safe. We never saw any large
masses detached, and by the time the ice reached the glacier floor it
was all reduced to dust and small fragments. One does not recall in the
reading of mountaineering books any account of so lofty an ice-fall.
[Illustration: Cutting a staircase three miles long in the ice of the
shattered ridge.]
FOOTNOTES:
[1] I have since learned that this mountain was named Mount Brooks by
Professor Parker, and so withdraw the suggested name.
[2] See frontispiece.