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Travels in Alaska

J >> John Muir >> Travels in Alaska




Nevertheless, we arose next morning in newness of life. Never before
had rocks and ice and trees seemed so beautiful and wonderful, even
the cold, biting rainstorm that was blowing seemed full of
loving-kindness, wonderful compensation for all that we had endured,
and we sailed down the bay through the gray, driving rain rejoicing.



Chapter XVI

Glacier Bay


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 Perouse, 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 spiraea 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.

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