Fortunately
to most travelers the thundering ice-wall, while comfortably
accessible, is also the most strikingly interesting portion of the
glacier.
The mountains about the great glacier were also seen from this
standpoint in exceedingly grand and telling views, ranged and grouped
in glorious array. Along the valleys of the main tributaries to the
northwestward I saw far into their shadowy depths, one noble peak in
its snowy robes appearing beyond another in fine perspective. One of
the most remarkable of them, fashioned like a superb crown with
delicately fluted sides, stands in the middle of the second main
tributary, counting from left to right. To the westward the
magnificent Fairweather Range is displayed in all its glory, lifting
its peaks and glaciers into the blue sky. Mt. Fairweather, though not
the highest, is the noblest and most majestic in port and
architecture of all the sky-dwelling company. La Perouse, at the
south end of the range, is also a magnificent mountain, symmetrically
peaked and sculptured, and wears its robes of snow and glaciers in
noble style. Lituya, as seen from here, is an immense tower, severely
plain and massive. It makes a fine and terrible and lonely
impression. Crillon, though the loftiest of all (being nearly sixteen
thousand feet high), presents no well-marked features. Its ponderous
glaciers have ground it away into long, curling ridges until, from
this point of view, it resembles a huge twisted shell. The lower
summits about the Muir Glacier, like this one, the first that I
climbed, are richly adorned and enlivened with flowers, though they
make but a faint show in general views. Lines and dashes of bright
green appear on the lower slopes as one approaches them from the
glacier, and a fainter green tinge may be noticed on the subordinate
summits at a height of two thousand or three thousand feet. The lower
are mostly alder bushes and the topmost a lavish profusion of
flowering plants, chiefly cassiope, vaccinium, pyrola, erigeron,
gentiana, campanula, anemone, larkspur, and columbine, with a few
grasses and ferns. Of these cassiope is at once the commonest and the
most beautiful and influential. In some places its delicate stems
make mattresses more than a foot thick over several acres, while the
bloom is so abundant that a single handful plucked at random contains
hundreds of its pale pink bells. The very thought of this Alaska
garden is a joyful exhilaration. Though the storm-beaten ground it is
growing on is nearly half a mile high, the glacier centuries ago
flowed over it as a river flows over a boulder; but out of all the
cold darkness and glacial crushing and grinding comes this warm,
abounding beauty and life to teach us that what we in our faithless
ignorance and fear call destruction is creation finer and finer.
When night was approaching I scrambled down out of my blessed garden
to the glacier, and returned to my lonely camp, and, getting some
coffee and bread, again went up the moraine to the east end of the
great ice-wall. It is about three miles long, but the length of the
jagged, berg-producing portion that stretches across the fiord from
side to side like a huge green-and-blue barrier is only about two
miles and rises above the water to a height of from two hundred and
fifty to three hundred feet. Soundings made by Captain Carroll show
that seven hundred and twenty feet of the wall is below the surface,
and a third unmeasured portion is buried beneath the moraine detritus
deposited at the foot of it. Therefore, were the water and rocky
detritus cleared away, a sheer precipice of ice would be presented
nearly two miles long and more than a thousand feet high. Seen from a
distance, as you come up the fiord, it seems comparatively regular in
form, but it is far otherwise; bold, jagged capes jut forward into
the fiord, alternating with deep reentering angles and craggy
hollows with plain bastions, while the top is roughened with
innumerable spires and pyramids and sharp hacked blades leaning and
toppling or cutting straight into the sky.
The number of bergs given off varies somewhat with the weather and
the tides, the average being about one every five or six minutes,
counting only those that roar loud enough to make themselves heard at
a distance of two or three miles. The very largest, however, may
under favorable conditions be heard ten miles or even farther. When a
large mass sinks from the upper fissured portion of the wall, there
is first a keen, prolonged, thundering roar, which slowly subsides
into a low muttering growl, followed by numerous smaller grating
clashing sounds from the agitated bergs that dance in the waves about
the newcomer as if in welcome; and these again are followed by the
swash and roar of the waves that are raised and hurled up the beach
against the moraines. But the largest and most beautiful of the
bergs, instead of thus falling from the upper weathered portion of
the wall, rise from the submerged portion with a still grander
commotion, springing with tremendous voice and gestures nearly to the
top of the wall, tons of water streaming like hair down their sides,
plunging and rising again and again before they finally settle in
perfect poise, free at last, after having formed part of the
slow-crawling glacier for centuries. And as we contemplate their
history, as they sail calmly away down the fiord to the sea, how
wonderful it seems that ice formed from pressed snow on the far-off
mountains two or three hundred years ago should still be pure and
lovely in color after all its travel and toil in the rough mountain
quarries, grinding and fashioning the features of predestined
landscapes.
When sunshine is sifting through the midst of the multitude of
icebergs that fill the fiord and through the jets of radiant spray
ever rising from the tremendous dashing and splashing of the falling
and upspringing bergs, the effect is indescribably glorious.
Glorious, too, are the shows they make in the night when the moon and
stars are shining.
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