But just across the river the "Big Glacier" was staring
me in the face, pouring its majestic flood through a broad mountain
gateway and expanding in the spacious river valley to a width of
four or five miles, while dim in the gray distance loomed its high
mountain fountains. So grand an invitation displayed in characters so
telling was of course irresistible, and body-care and weather-care
vanished.
Mr. Choquette, the keeper of the station, ferried me across the
river, and I spent the day in getting general views and planning
the work that had been long in mind. I first traced the broad,
complicated terminal moraine to its southern extremity, climbed up
the west side along the lateral moraine three or four miles, making
my way now on the glacier, now on the moraine-covered bank, and now
compelled to climb up through the timber and brush in order to pass
some rocky headland, until I reached a point commanding a good
general view of the lower end of the glacier. Heavy, blotting rain
then began to fall, and I retraced my steps, oftentimes stopping to
admire the blue ice-caves into which glad, rejoicing streams from
the mountain-side were hurrying as if going home, while the glacier
seemed to open wide its crystal gateways to welcome them.
The following morning blotting rain was still falling, but time and
work was too precious to mind it. Kind Mr. Choquette put me across
the river in a canoe, with a lot of biscuits his Indian wife had
baked for me and some dried salmon, a little sugar and tea, a
blanket, and a piece of light sheeting for shelter from rain during
the night, all rolled into one bundle.
"When shall I expect you back?" inquired Choquette, when I bade him
good-bye.
"Oh, any time," I replied. "I shall see as much as possible of the
glacier, and I know not how long it will hold me."
"Well, but when will I come to look for you, if anything happens?
Where are you going to try to go? Years ago Russian officers from
Sitka went up the glacier from here and none ever returned. It's a
mighty dangerous glacier, all full of damn deep holes and cracks.
You've no idea what ticklish deceiving traps are scattered over it."
"Yes, I have," I said. "I have seen glaciers before, though none so
big as this one. Do not look for me until I make my appearance on the
river-bank. Never mind me. I am used to caring for myself." And so,
shouldering my bundle, I trudged off through the moraine boulders and
thickets.
My general plan was to trace the terminal moraine to its extreme
north end, pitch my little tent, leave the blanket and most of the
hardtack, and from this main camp go and come as hunger required or
allowed.
After examining a cross-section of the broad moraine, roughened by
concentric masses, marking interruptions in the recession of the
glacier of perhaps several centuries, in which the successive
moraines were formed and shoved together in closer or wider order, I
traced the moraine to its northeastern extremity and ascended the
glacier for several miles along the left margin, then crossed it at
the grand cataract and down the right side to the river, and along
the moraine to the point of beginning.
On the older portions of this moraine I discovered several kettles in
process of formation and was pleased to find that they conformed in
the most striking way with the theory I had already been led to make
from observations on the old kettles which form so curious a feature
of the drift covering Wisconsin and Minnesota and some of the larger
moraines of the residual glaciers in the California Sierra. I found
a pit eight or ten feet deep with raw shifting sides countersunk
abruptly in the rough moraine material, and at the bottom, on sliding
down by the aid of a lithe spruce tree that was being undermined, I
discovered, after digging down a foot or two, that the bottom was
resting on a block of solid blue ice which had been buried in the
moraine perhaps a century or more, judging by the age of the tree
that had grown above it. Probably more than another century will be
required to complete the formation of this kettle by the slow melting
of the buried ice-block. The moraine material of course was falling
in as the ice melted, and the sides maintained an angle as steep as
the material would lie. All sorts of theories have been advanced for
the formation of these kettles, so abundant in the drift over a great
part of the United States, and I was glad to be able to set the
question at rest, at least as far as I was concerned.
The glacier and the mountains about it are on so grand a scale and so
generally inaccessible in the ordinary sense, it seemed to matter but
little what course I pursued. Everything was full of interest, even
the weather, though about as unfavorable as possible for wide views,
and scrambling through the moraine jungle brush kept one as wet as if
all the way was beneath a cascade.
I pushed on, with many a rest and halt to admire the bold and
marvelously sculptured ice-front, looking all the grander and more
striking in the gray mist with all the rest of the glacier shut out,
until I came to a lake about two hundred yards wide and two miles
long with scores of small bergs floating in it, some aground, close
inshore against the moraine, the light playing on their angles and
shimmering in their blue caves in ravishing tones.
