I Therefore Set Out
On An Excursion, And Spent The Day Alone On The Mountain-Slopes Above
The Camp, And Northward, To See What I Might Learn.
Pushing on
through rain and mud and sludgy snow, crossing many brown,
boulder-choked torrents, wading, jumping, and wallowing in snow up to
my shoulders was mountaineering of the most trying kind.
After
crouching cramped and benumbed in the canoe, poulticed in wet or damp
clothing night and day, my limbs had been asleep. This day they were
awakened and in the hour of trial proved that they had not lost the
cunning learned on many a mountain peak of the High Sierra. I reached
a height of fifteen hundred feet, on the ridge that bounds the second
of the great glaciers. All the landscape was smothered in clouds and
I began to fear that as far as wide views were concerned I had
climbed in vain. But at length the clouds lifted a little, and
beneath their gray fringes I saw the berg-filled expanse of the bay,
and the feet of the mountains that stand about it, and the imposing
fronts of five huge glaciers, the nearest being immediately beneath
me. This was my first general view of Glacier Bay, a solitude of ice
and snow and newborn rocks, dim, dreary, mysterious. I held the
ground I had so dearly won for an hour or two, sheltering myself from
the blast as best I could, while with benumbed fingers I sketched
what I could see of the landscape, and wrote a few lines in my
notebook.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 143 of 316
Words from 38861 to 39125
of 85542
