I Answered As Best I Could, Keeping Up A
Running Commentary On The Subject In General, While Busily Engaged In
Sketching and noting my own observations, preaching glacial gospel in
a rambling way, while the Cassiar, slowly wheezing and creeping
Along
the shore, shifted our position so that the icy canyons were opened to
view and closed again in regular succession, like the leaves of a
book.
About the middle of the afternoon we were directly opposite a noble
group of glaciers some ten in number, flowing from a chain of
crater-like snow fountains, guarded around their summits and well
down their sides by jagged peaks and cols and curving mural ridges.
From each of the larger clusters of fountains, a wide, sheer-walled
canyon opens down to the sea. Three of the trunk glaciers descend to
within a few feet of the sea-level. The largest of the three,
probably about fifteen miles long, terminates in a magnificent valley
like Yosemite, in an imposing wall of ice about two miles long, and
from three to five hundred feet high, forming a barrier across the
valley from wall to wall. It was to this glacier that the ships of
the Alaska Ice Company resorted for the ice they carried to San
Francisco and the Sandwich Islands, and, I believe, also to China and
Japan. To load, they had only to sail up the fiord within a short
distance of the front and drop anchor in the terminal moraine.
Another glacier, a few miles to the south of this one, receives two
large tributaries about equal in size, and then flows down a forested
valley to within a hundred feet or so of sea-level.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 57 of 316
Words from 15483 to 15767
of 85542
