Here You Glide Into A
Narrow Channel Hemmed In By Mountain Walls, Forested Down To The
Water's Edge, Where There
Is no distant view, and your attention is
concentrated on the objects close about you - the crowded spires of
the
Spruces and hemlocks rising higher and higher on the steep green
slopes; stripes of paler green where winter avalanches have cleared
away the trees, allowing grasses and willows to spring up; zigzags
of cascades appearing and disappearing among the bushes and trees;
short, steep glens with brawling streams hidden beneath alder and
dogwood, seen only where they emerge on the brown algae of the shore;
and retreating hollows, with lingering snow-banks marking the
fountains of ancient glaciers. The steamer is often so near the shore
that you may distinctly see the cones clustered on the tops of the
trees, and the ferns and bushes at their feet.
But new scenes are brought to view with magical rapidity. Rounding
some bossy cape, the eye is called away into far-reaching vistas,
bounded on either hand by headlands in charming array, one dipping
gracefully beyond another and growing fainter and more ethereal in
the distance. The tranquil channel stretching river-like between,
may be stirred here and there by the silvery plashing of upspringing
salmon, or by flocks of white gulls floating like water-lilies among
the sun spangles; while mellow, tempered sunshine is streaming over
all, blending sky, land, and water in pale, misty blue. Then, while
you are dreamily gazing into the depths of this leafy ocean lane, the
little steamer, seeming hardly larger than a duck, turning into some
passage not visible until the moment of entering it, glides into a
wide expanse - a sound filled with islands, sprinkled and clustered in
forms and compositions such as nature alone can invent; some of them
so small the trees growing on them seem like single handfuls culled
from the neighboring woods and set in the water to keep them fresh,
while here and there at wide intervals you may notice bare rocks just
above the water, mere dots punctuating grand, outswelling sentences
of islands.
The variety we find, both as to the contours and the collocation of
the islands, is due chiefly to differences in the structure and
composition of their rocks, and the unequal glacial denudation
different portions of the coast were subjected to. This influence
must have been especially heavy toward the end of the glacial period,
when the main ice-sheet began to break up into separate glaciers.
Moreover, the mountains of the larger islands nourished local
glaciers, some of them of considerable size, which sculptured their
summits and sides, forming in some cases wide cirques with canyons or
valleys leading down from them into the channels and sounds. These
causes have produced much of the bewildering variety of which nature
is so fond, but none the less will the studious observer see the
underlying harmony - the general trend of the islands in the direction
of the flow of the main ice-mantle from the mountains of the Coast
Range, more or less varied by subordinate foothill ridges and
mountains.
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