It shows grandly from
where it broke on our sight, sweeping boldly forward and downward in
its majestic channel, swaying from side to side in graceful fluent
lines around stern unflinching rocks. While I stood in the canoe
making a sketch of it, several bergs came off with tremendous dashing
and thunder, raising a cloud of ice-dust and spray to a height of a
hundred feet or more.
"The ice-mountain is well disposed toward you," said Tyeen. "He is
firing his big guns to welcome you."
After completing my sketch and entering a few notes, I directed the
crew to pull around a lofty burnished rock on the west side of the
channel, where, as I knew from the trend of the canyon, a large
glacier once came in; and what was my delight to discover that the
glacier was still there and still pouring its ice into a branch of
the fiord. Even the Indians shared my joy and shouted with me. I
expected only one first-class glacier here, and found two. They are
only about two miles apart. How glorious a mansion that precious pair
dwell in! After sunset we made haste to seek a camp-ground. I would
fain have shared these upper chambers with the two glaciers, but
there was no landing-place in sight, and we had to make our way back
a few miles in the twilight to the mouth of a side canyon where we had
seen timber on the way up. There seemed to be a good landing as we
approached the shore, but, coming nearer, we found that the granite
fell directly into deep water without leading any level margin,
though the slope a short distance back was not very steep.
After narrowly scanning the various seams and steps that roughened
the granite, we concluded to attempt a landing rather than grope our
way farther down the fiord through the ice. And what a time we had
climbing on hands and knees up the slippery glacier-polished rocks to
a shelf some two hundred feet above the water and dragging provisions
and blankets after us! But it proved to be a glorious place, the very
best camp-ground of all the trip, - a perfect garden, ripe berries
nodding from a fringe of bushes around its edges charmingly displayed
in the light of our big fire. Close alongside there was a lofty
mountain capped with ice, and from the blue edge of that ice-cap
there were sixteen silvery cascades in a row, falling about four
thousand feet, each one of the sixteen large enough to be heard at
least two miles.
How beautiful was the firelight on the nearest larkspurs and
geraniums and daisies of our garden! How hearty the wave greeting on
the rocks below brought to us from the two glaciers! And how glorious
a song the sixteen cascades sang!
The cascade songs made us sleep all the sounder, and we were so happy
as to find in the morning that the berg waves had spared our canoe.
We set off in high spirits down the fiord and across to the right
side to explore a remarkably deep and narrow branch of the main fiord
that I had noted on the way up, and that, from the magnitude of the
glacial characters on the two colossal rocks that guard the entrance,
promised a rich reward for our pains.
After we had sailed about three miles up this side fiord, we came to
what seemed to be its head, for trees and rocks swept in a curve
around from one side to the other without showing any opening,
although the walls of the canyon were seen extending back
indefinitely, one majestic brow beyond the other.
When we were tracing this curve, however, in a leisurely way, in
search of a good landing, we were startled by Captain Tyeen shouting,
"Skookum chuck! Skookum chuck!" (strong water, strong water), and
found our canoe was being swept sideways by a powerful current, the
roar of which we had mistaken for a waterfall. We barely escaped
being carried over a rocky bar on the boiling flood, which, as we
afterwards learned, would have been only a happy shove on our way.
After we had made a landing a little distance back from the brow of
the bar, we climbed the highest rock near the shore to seek a view of
the channel beyond the inflowing tide rapids, to find out whether or
no we could safely venture in. Up over rolling, mossy, bushy,
burnished rock waves we scrambled for an hour or two, which resulted
in a fair view of the deep-blue waters of the fiord stretching on and
on along the feet of the most majestic Yosemite rocks we had yet
seen. This determined our plan of shooting the rapids and exploring
it to its farthest recesses. This novel interruption of the channel
is a bar of exceedingly hard resisting granite, over which the great
glacier that once occupied it swept, without degrading it to the
general level, and over which tide-waters now rush in and out with
the violence of a mountain torrent.
Returning to the canoe, we pushed off, and in a few moments were
racing over the bar with lightning speed through hurrahing waves and
eddies and sheets of foam, our little shell of a boat tossing lightly
as a bubble. Then, rowing across a belt of back-flowing water, we
found ourselves on a smooth mirror reach between granite walls of the
very wildest and most exciting description, surpassing in some ways
those of the far-famed Yosemite Valley.
