I Had A Hard Climb, But Wonderful Views Were Developed And
I Sketched The Glacier From This High Point And Most Of Its Upper
Fountains.
Many fine alpine plants grew here, an anemone on the summit, two
species of cassiope in shaggy mats, three
Or four dwarf willows,
large blue hairy lupines eighteen inches high, parnassia, phlox,
solidago, dandelion, white-flowered bryanthus, daisy, pedicularis,
epilobium, etc., with grasses, sedges, mosses, and lichens, forming a
delightful deep spongy sod. Woodchucks stood erect and piped
dolefully for an hour "Chee-chee!" with jaws absurdly stretched to
emit so thin a note - rusty-looking, seedy fellows, also a smaller
striped species which stood erect and cheeped and whistled like a
Douglas squirrel. I saw three or four species of birds. A finch flew
from her nest at my feet; and I almost stepped on a family of young
ptarmigan ere they scattered, little bunches of downy brown silk,
small but able to run well. They scattered along a snow-bank, over
boulders, through willows, grass, and flowers, while the mother, very
lame, tumbled and sprawled at my feet. I stood still until the little
ones began to peep; the mother answered "Too-too-too" and showed
admirable judgment and devotion. She was in brown plumage with white
on the wing primaries. She had fine grounds on which to lead and feed
her young.
Not a cloud in the sky to-day; a faint film to the north vanished by
noon, leaving all the sky full of soft, hazy light. The magnificent
mountains around the widespread tributaries of the glacier; the
great, gently undulating, prairie-like expanse of the main trunk,
bluish on the east, pure white on the west and north; its trains of
moraines in magnificent curving lines and many colors - black, gray,
red, and brown; the stormy, cataract-like, crevassed sections; the
hundred fountains; the lofty, pure white Fairweather Range; the
thunder of the plunging bergs; the fleet of bergs sailing tranquilly
in the inlet - formed a glowing picture of nature's beauty and power.
July 2. I crossed the inlet with Mr. Reid and Mr. Adams to-day. The
stratified drift on the west side all the way from top to base
contains fossil wood. On the east side, as far as I have seen it, the
wood occurs only in one stratum at a height of about a hundred and
twenty feet in sand and clay. Some in a bank of the west side are
rooted in clay soil. I noticed a large grove of stumps in a
washed-out channel near the glacier-front but had no time to examine
closely. Evidently a flood carrying great quantities of sand and
gravel had overwhelmed and broken off these trees, leaving high
stumps. The deposit, about a hundred feet or more above them, had
been recently washed out by one of the draining streams of the
glacier, exposing a part of the old forest floor certainly two or
three centuries old.
I climbed along the right bank of the lowest of the tributaries and
set a signal flag on a ridge fourteen hundred feet high. This
tributary is about one and a fourth or one and a half miles wide and
has four secondary tributaries. It reaches tide-water but gives off
no bergs. Later I climbed the large Nunatak Island, seven thousand
feet high, near the west margin of the glacier. It is composed of
crumbling granite draggled with washed boulders, but has some
enduring bosses which on sides and top are polished and scored
rigidly, showing that it had been heavily overswept by the glacier
when it was thousands of feet deeper than now, like a submerged
boulder in a river-channel. This island is very irregular in form,
owing to the variations in the structure joints of the granite. It
has several small lakelets and has been loaded with glacial drift,
but by the melting of the ice about its flanks is shedding it off,
together with some of its own crumbling surface. I descended a deep
rock gully on the north side, the rawest, dirtiest, dustiest, most
dangerous that I have seen hereabouts. There is also a large quantity
of fossil wood scattered on this island, especially on the north
side, that on the south side having been cleared off and carried away
by the first tributary glacier, which, being lower and melting
earlier, has allowed the soil of the moraine material to fall,
together with its forest, and be carried off. That on the north side
is now being carried off or buried. The last of the main ice
foundation is melting and the moraine material re-formed over and
over again, and the fallen tree-trunks, decayed or half decayed or in
a fair state of preservation, are also unburied and buried again or
carried off to the terminal or lateral moraine.
I found three small seedling Sitka spruces, feeble beginnings of a
new forest. The circumference of the island is about seven miles. I
arrived at camp about midnight, tired and cold. Sailing across the
inlet in a cranky rotten boat through the midst of icebergs was
dangerous, and I was glad to get ashore.
July 4. I climbed the east wall to the summit, about thirty-one
hundred feet or so, by the northernmost ravine next to the yellow
ridge, finding about a mile of snow in the upper portion of the
ravine and patches on the summit. A few of the patches probably lie
all the year, the ground beneath them is so plantless. On the edge of
some of the snow-banks I noticed cassiope. The thin, green, mosslike
patches seen from camp are composed of a rich, shaggy growth of
cassiope, white-flowered bryanthus, dwarf vaccinium with bright pink
flowers, saxifrages, anemones, bluebells, gentians, small erigeron,
pedicularis, dwarf-willow and a few species of grasses. Of these,
Cassiope tetragona is far the most influential and beautiful. Here it
forms mats a foot thick and an acre or more in area, the sections
being measured by the size and drainage of the soil-patches.
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