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Travels in Alaska

J >> John Muir >> Travels in Alaska




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 Perouse,
Crillon, Lituya, and Fairweather. Mt. Fairweather is the most
beautiful of all the giants that stand guard about Glacier Bay. When
the sun is shining on it from the east or south its magnificent
glaciers and colors are brought out in most telling display. In the
late afternoon its features become less distinct. The atmosphere
seems pale and hazy, though around to the north and northeastward of
Fairweather innumerable white peaks are displayed, the highest
fountain-heads of the Muir Glacier crowded together in bewildering
array, most exciting and inviting to the mountaineer. Altogether I
have had a delightful day, a truly glorious celebration of the fourth.

July 6. I sailed three or four miles down the east coast of the inlet
with the Reid party's cook, who is supposed to be an experienced
camper and prospector, and landed at a stratified moraine-bank. It
was here that I camped in 1880, a point at that time less than half a
mile from the front of the glacier, now one and a half miles. I found
my Indian's old camp made just ten years ago, and Professor Wright's
of five years ago. Their alder-bough beds and fireplace were still
marked and but little decayed. I found thirty-three species of plants
in flower, not counting willows--a showy garden on the shore only a
few feet above high tide, watered by a fine stream. Lutkea,
hedysarum, parnassia, epilobium, bluebell, solidago, habenaria,
strawberry with fruit half grown, arctostaphylos, mertensia,
erigeron, willows, tall grasses and alder are the principal species.
There are many butterflies in this garden. Gulls are breeding near
here. I saw young in the water to-day.

On my way back to camp I discovered a group of monumental stumps in a
washed-out valley of the moraine and went ashore to observe them.
They are in the dry course of a flood-channel about eighty feet above
mean tide and four or five hundred yards back from the shore, where
they have been pounded and battered by boulders rolling against them
and over them, making them look like gigantic shaving-brushes. The
largest is about three feet in diameter and probably three hundred
years old. I mean to return and examine them at leisure. A smaller
stump, still firmly rooted, is standing astride of an old crumbling
trunk, showing that at least two generations of trees flourished here
undisturbed by the advance or retreat of the glacier or by its
draining stream-floods. They are Sitka spruces and the wood is mostly
in a good state of preservation. How these trees were broken off
without being uprooted is dark to me at present. Perhaps most of
their companions were up rooted and carried away.

July 7. Another fine day; scarce a cloud in the sky. The icebergs in
the bay are miraged in the distance to look like the frontal wall of
a great glacier. I am writing letters in anticipation of the next
steamer, the Queen.

She arrived about 2.30 P.M. with two hundred and thirty tourists.
What a show they made with their ribbons and kodaks! All seemed happy
and enthusiastic, though it was curious to see how promptly all of
them ceased gazing when the dinner-bell rang, and how many turned
from the great thundering crystal world of ice to look curiously at
the Indians that came alongside to sell trinkets, and how our little
camp and kitchen arrangements excited so many to loiter and waste
their precious time prying into our poor hut.

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