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.
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