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.
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