Nothing Could Be More Striking Than The
Contrast Between The Raw, Crumbling, Deforested Portions Of The
Mountain, Looking Like A
Quarry that was being worked, and the
forested part with its rich, shaggy beds of cassiope and bryanthus
in full
Bloom, and its sumptuous cushions of flower-enameled mosses.
These garden-patches are full of gay colors of gentian, erigeron,
anemone, larkspur, and columbine, and are enlivened with happy birds
and bees and marmots. Climbing to an elevation of twenty-five hundred
feet, which is about fifteen hundred feet above the level of the
glacier at this point, I saw and heard a few marmots, and three
ptarmigans that were as tame as barnyard fowls. The sod is sloughing
off on the edges, keeping it ragged. The trees are storm-bent from
the southeast. A few are standing at an elevation of nearly three
thousand feet; at twenty-five hundred feet, pyrola, veratrum,
vaccinium, fine grasses, sedges, willows, mountain-ash, buttercups,
and acres of the most luxuriant cassiope are in bloom.
A lake encumbered with icebergs lies at the end of Divide Glacier. A
spacious, level-floored valley beyond it, eight or ten miles long,
with forested mountains on its west side, perhaps discharges to the
southeastward into Lynn Canal. The divide of the glacier is about
opposite the third of the eastern tributaries. Another berg-dotted
lake into which the drainage of the Braided Glacier flows, lies a few
miles to the westward and is one and a half miles long.
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