In September Clear Days Were Rare, More Than Three Fourths Of Them
Were Either Decidedly Cloudy Or Rainy, And The
Rains of this month
were, with one wild exception, only moderately heavy, and the clouds
between showers drooped and crawled
In a ragged, unsettled way
without betraying hints of violence such as one often sees in the
gestures of mountain storm-clouds.
July was the brightest month of the summer, with fourteen days of
sunshine, six of them in uninterrupted succession, with a temperature
at 7 A.M. of about 60 degrees, at 12 M., 70 degrees. The average 7 A.M.
temperature for June was 54.3 degrees; the average 7 A.M. temperature
for July was 55.3 degrees; at 12 M. the average temperature was 61.45
degrees; the average 7 A.M. temperature for August was 54.12 degrees;
12 M., 61.48 degrees; the average 7 A.M. temperature for September was
52.14 degrees; and 12 M., 56.12 degrees.
The highest temperature observed here during the summer was
seventy-six degrees. The most remarkable characteristic of this
summer weather, even the brightest of it, is the velvet softness
of the atmosphere. On the mountains of California, throughout the
greater part of the year, the presence of an atmosphere is hardly
recognized, and the thin, white, bodiless light of the morning comes
to the peaks and glaciers as a pure spiritual essence, the most
impressive of all the terrestrial manifestations of God. The clearest
of Alaskan air is always appreciably substantial, so much so that it
would seem as if one might test its quality by rubbing it between the
thumb and finger. I never before saw summer days so white and so full
of subdued lustre.
The winter storms, up to the end of December when I left Wrangell,
were mostly rain at a temperature of thirty-five or forty degrees,
with strong winds which sometimes roughly lash the shores and carry
scud far into the woods. The long nights are then gloomy enough and
the value of snug homes with crackling yellow cedar fires may be
finely appreciated. Snow falls frequently, but never to any great
depth or to lie long. It is said that only once since the settlement
of Fort Wrangell has the ground been covered to a depth of four feet.
The mercury seldom falls more than five or six degrees below the
freezing-point, unless the wind blows steadily from the mainland.
Back from the coast, however, beyond the mountains, the winter months
are very cold. On the Stickeen River at Glenora, less than a thousand
feet above the level of the sea, a temperature of from thirty to
forty degrees below zero is not uncommon.
Chapter IV
The Stickeen River
The most interesting of the short excursions we made from Fort
Wrangell was the one up the Stickeen River to the head of steam
navigation. From Mt. St. Elias the coast range extends in a broad,
lofty chain beyond the southern boundary of the territory, gashed by
stupendous canyons, each of which carries a lively river, though most
of them are comparatively short, as their highest sources lie in the
icy solitudes of the range within forty or fifty miles of the coast.
A few, however, of these foaming, roaring streams - the Alsek,
Chilcat, Chilcoot, Taku, Stickeen, and perhaps others - head beyond
the range with some of the southwest branches of the Mackenzie and
Yukon.
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