When We Were Tracing This Curve, However, In A Leisurely Way, In
Search Of A Good Landing, We Were Startled By Captain Tyeen Shouting,
"Skookum Chuck!
Skookum chuck!" (strong water, strong water), and
found our canoe was being swept sideways by a powerful current, the
roar of which we had mistaken for a waterfall.
We barely escaped
being carried over a rocky bar on the boiling flood, which, as we
afterwards learned, would have been only a happy shove on our way.
After we had made a landing a little distance back from the brow of
the bar, we climbed the highest rock near the shore to seek a view of
the channel beyond the inflowing tide rapids, to find out whether or
no we could safely venture in. Up over rolling, mossy, bushy,
burnished rock waves we scrambled for an hour or two, which resulted
in a fair view of the deep-blue waters of the fiord stretching on and
on along the feet of the most majestic Yosemite rocks we had yet
seen. This determined our plan of shooting the rapids and exploring
it to its farthest recesses. This novel interruption of the channel
is a bar of exceedingly hard resisting granite, over which the great
glacier that once occupied it swept, without degrading it to the
general level, and over which tide-waters now rush in and out with
the violence of a mountain torrent.
Returning to the canoe, we pushed off, and in a few moments were
racing over the bar with lightning speed through hurrahing waves and
eddies and sheets of foam, our little shell of a boat tossing lightly
as a bubble.
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