Climbing Higher For A
Still Broader Outlook, I Made Notes And Sketched, Improving The
Precious Time While Sunshine Streamed Through
The luminous fringes of
the clouds and fell on the green waters of the fiord, the glittering
bergs, the crystal
Bluffs of the vast glacier, the intensely white,
far-spreading fields of ice, and the ineffably chaste and spiritual
heights of the Fairweather Range, which were now hidden, now partly
revealed, the whole making a picture of icy wildness unspeakably pure
and sublime.
Looking southward, a broad ice-sheet was seen extending in a gently
undulating plain from the Pacific Fiord in the foreground to the
horizon, dotted and ridged here and there with mountains which were
as white as the snow-covered ice in which they were half, or more
than half, submerged. Several of the great glaciers of the bay flow
from this one grand fountain. It is an instructive example of a
general glacier covering the hills and dales of a country that is not
yet ready to be brought to the light of day - not only covering but
creating a landscape with the features it is destined to have when,
in the fullness of time, the fashioning ice-sheet shall be lifted by
the sun, and the land become warm and fruitful. The view to the
westward is bounded and almost filled by the glorious Fairweather
Mountains, the highest among them springing aloft in sublime beauty
to a height of nearly sixteen thousand feet, while from base to
summit every peak and spire and dividing ridge of all the mighty host
was spotless white, as if painted. It would seem that snow could
never be made to lie on the steepest slopes and precipices unless
plastered on when wet, and then frozen. But this snow could not have
been wet. It must have been fixed by being driven and set in small
particles like the storm-dust of drifts, which, when in this
condition, is fixed not only on sheer cliffs, but in massive,
overcurling cornices. Along the base of this majestic range sweeps
the Pacific Glacier, fed by innumerable cascading tributaries, and
discharging into the head of its fiord by two mouths only partly
separated by the brow of an island rock about one thousand feet high,
each nearly a mile wide.
Dancing down the mountain to camp, my mind glowing like the sunbeaten
glaciers, I found the Indians seated around a good fire, entirely
happy now that the farthest point of the journey was safely reached
and the long, dark storm was cleared away. How hopefully, peacefully
bright that night were the stars in the frosty sky, and how
impressive was the thunder of the icebergs, rolling, swelling,
reverberating through the solemn stillness! I was too happy to sleep.
About daylight next morning we crossed the fiord and landed on the
south side of the rock that divides the wall of the great glacier.
The whiskered faces of seals dotted the open spaces between the
bergs, and I could not prevent John and Charley and Kadachan from
shooting at them. Fortunately, few, if any, were hurt. Leaving the
Indians in charge of the canoe, I managed to climb to the top of the
wall by a good deal of step-cutting between the ice and dividing
rock, and gained a good general view of the glacier. At one favorable
place I descended about fifty feet below the side of the glacier,
where its denuding, fashioning action was clearly shown. Pushing back
from here, I found the surface crevassed and sunken in steps, like
the Hugh Miller Glacier, as if it were being undermined by the action
of tide-waters. For a distance of fifteen or twenty miles the
river-like ice-flood is nearly level, and when it recedes, the ocean
water will follow it, and thus form a long extension of the fiord,
with features essentially the same as those now extending into the
continent farther south, where many great glaciers once poured into
the sea, though scarce a vestige of them now exists. Thus the domain
of the sea has been, and is being, extended in these ice-sculptured
lands, and the scenery of their shores enriched. The brow of the
dividing rock is about a thousand feet high, and is hard beset by the
glacier. A short time ago it was at least two thousand feet below the
surface of the over-sweeping ice; and under present climatic
conditions it will soon take its place as a glacier-polished island
in the middle of the fiord, like a thousand others in the magnificent
archipelago. Emerging from its icy sepulchre, it gives a most telling
illustration of the birth of a marked feature of a landscape. In this
instance it is not the mountain, but the glacier, that is in labor,
and the mountain itself is being brought forth.
The Hoona Glacier enters the fiord on the south side, a short
distance below the Pacific, displaying a broad and far-reaching
expanse, over which many lofty peaks are seen; but the front wall,
thrust into the fiord, is not nearly so interesting as that of the
Pacific, and I did not observe any bergs discharged from it.
In the evening, after witnessing the unveiling of the majestic peaks
and glaciers and their baptism in the down-pouring sunbeams, it
seemed inconceivable that nature could have anything finer to show
us. Nevertheless, compared with what was to come the next morning,
all that was as nothing. The calm dawn gave no promise of anything
uncommon. Its most impressive features were the frosty clearness of
the sky and a deep, brooding stillness made all the more striking by
the thunder of the newborn bergs. The sunrise we did not see at all,
for we were beneath the shadows of the fiord cliffs; but in the midst
of our studies, while the Indians were getting ready to sail, we were
startled by the sudden appearance of a red light burning with a
strange unearthly splendor on the topmost peak of the Fairweather
Mountains.
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