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39
VEGETATION.
Alaska, is the highest snow mountain on earth, so far as known, outside of the Arctic and Antarctic regions, and also excepting Greenland, and carries the most extensive glaciers known. There are said to be at the base of the range in which this moun- tain is contained, two thousand four hundred square miles of flat plains of ice between the mountains and the sea, all included between Cross Sound and the Copper River. The reader's natural supposition would be that within such a region all would be sterile and forbidding, and that vegetation could not exist. This, however, is not the case, as along the banks of the stream and at the very edges of the glaciers, wild flowers and grasses flourish luxuri- antly, while the music of numerous song-birds fills the air. A wild strawberry of large size grows in profusion and is of the most delicate flavor. Hum- ming-birds are also quite common. A writer who accompanied one of the exploring expeditions is enthusiastic over two dishes that were served to him at Yakatat by the natives, one being humming-birds with clam sauce and strawberry short-cake made from cornmeal. Lieutenant Schwatka also speaks of the luxuriance of vegetable growth extending from the edges of the glaciers to the shore-line, and describes it as being absolutely tropical.
Among the more notable of the great glaciers is the Davidson, on Lynn Channel near Chilkat. It comes down the eastern side of the watershed of which the Muir Glacier occupies the western slope, and their sources, rising as they do in the same sum- mits and disconnected, if at all, by but a few miles, have · led some authorities to call the Davidson a branch of the Muir, but they are as distinct as two
40
DAVIDSON GLACIER.
rivers seeking the sea, one by either slope of a mountain range. The Davidson is one of the most beautiful glaciers of Alaska. Its great sloping area between the mountains suddenly rounds and broad- ens out three miles, its serrated, pinnacled face of brilliant blue towering twelve hundred feet. The glacier ends in a terminal moraine which is covered with a dense forest about two miles deep and rising one hundred feet, the green presenting a beautiful and striking contrast to the blue and white of the snow and ice which forms the background. With these inland glaciers the ice does not find its way to the sea, but melting runs off in streams, as is the case with the Davidson, where, at each side of the glacier, a small river empties the melted ice into the Channel. The Glacier is worthily named for Prof. George Davidson, who, in his capacity as Assistant Coast Surveyor, has done much for Alaska in obser- vation and exploration. A fact worthy of mention in connection with the glaciers of Alaska, is that ships supplied the Pacific Coast with ice in the early days of California, and "Sitka Ice" was a common sign in San Francisco as late as 1856. This was before the day of that great adjunct of civilization, the ice machine, and before there was a railroad to bring the great ice resources of the Sierra Nevada to San Francisco's door. Ice was ice in San Francisco in those days, and commanded what would now seem a fabulous price.
Notwithstanding all the investigation and all that has been said and written about glaciers, they still remain a phenomenon, and, to a certain extent, a mystery. The only data on which to estimate their . rate of motion is the result of Prof. Muir's extended
PHOTO ENGLUND
FRONT OF DAVIDSON GLACIER. From photograph No. 3, by WINTER PHOTO Co., Eugene, Ore.
41
MUIR'S EXPERIMENTS.
experiments to the velocity of the many glaciers he has explored. Across the top of the Muir Glacier he placed a row of signal stakes, about two miles from the great wall of ice facing the Bay, and, in twenty-four hours, he made a new survey, and found that on the shore side, by reason of the great erosive friction the movement had been but a few inches, while in the centre of the Glacier the ice had trav- eled seventy-eight feet, and the line of stakes were in the form of a bow, the centre bending toward the sea. The movement of the edges is slow, but the line of demarkation between the ice and the parallel moraine is perfectly defined, and so plain that for miles there is not a spot where the visitor cannot put one foot on the moraine and the other on the glacier. It is certain, however, that the gradual descent is such in the glacial system of the coast ranges of Alaska and British Columbia that the glaciers are rapidly decreasing in size and that the climate is growing drier and warmer. The tracks of the reces- sion of the ice bodies are plainly noticeable at Bute Inlet and Stikine, where there is at this time but slight erosive action, and small streams of pure water issue from the faces of the glaciers. Another notable glacier is that of Takou, on the glacier arm of St. Stephens Strait. The Hudson Bay Company's men and the Russians navigated the Takou Inlet as early as 1840 and the Company established a trading post in the shadow of the glacier.
Rainbow Glacier is another of the Lynn Channel system. It is called "Rainbow" from the fact that the ice in falling and crashing from a tremendous height into the channel below gorges in the form of an arch in which, in the sunshine, is reflected all the
42
LYNN CHANNEL GLACIERS.
colors and tints of the rainbow, and which forms a sight of grandeur once seen never to be forgotten. The great Auk Glacier is also one of the Lynn Channel system, and is exceeded in size only by the Muir, the Davidson and the Eagle. On Lynn Chan- nel, which was named by Vancouver after Lynn, Eng- land, there are no less than nineteen important glaciers, and Lynn Channel is pronounced by all Alaskan travelers as one of the most interesting and at the same time charming points in the Territory.
The author of this book has derived a great deal of information concerning the glacial period theories, and known existing glaciers in Alaska from Prof. John Muir, who was one of the pioneer scientific explorers of the Alaskan region, and who was the first recorded white man who ever gazed on the gla- cier which bears his name. Prof. Muir had for his guide the charts of Vancouver, whose explorations dated ninety years before Muir's visit, but such had been his care and caution in surveying the streams, their water-sheds and confluences, that, after this lapse of time, Prof. Muir found the Vancouver charts an infallible guide. The coast-line marks are to-day recognized as a guide by navigators, and each bay, inlet, channel; cove and roadstead noted by Van- couver is to-day a point for the guidance of naviga- tors, traders and explorers. The numerous islands which go to make up the terra firma of American territory, in what is known as Alaska, are all cor- rectly placed on the charts, and all subsequent soundings made by the United States have confirmed those made by Vancouver.
When Muir reached Cross Sound, he took a1 ancient native guide, and two or three Indians to
43
MUIR IN GLACIER BAY.
propel his canoe and accompany him up Glacier Bay. It being known that fuel was not to be found in a large distance surrounding the Glacier, such space as could be spared was stored with dry cedar and pine boughs, to make sure that Muir and his brave band could have camp-fires over which to warm themselves and cook their food. When Muir and his compan- ions reached a point in the vicinity of forty miles of the Glacier, Vancouver's charts gave out; that is, they showed that the British explorer had met an obstacle which prevented him from approaching nearer to the great moving frozen river. The appear- ances, however, show that a fracture must have oc- curred, shortly after Vancouver's time, by which some thirty miles of the Glacier were broken off and consequently disintegrated and carried seaward.
Prof. Muir, in describing this great example of Nature's irresistible forces, said to the author that the front and brow of the Glacier was "dashed and sculptured into a maze of yawning chasms, ravines, canyons, crevasses and a bewildering chaos of strange architectural forms, beautiful beyond the measure of description, and so bewildering in their beauty as to almost make the spectator believe that he was reveling in a dream." "There were," he said, "great clusters of glistening spires, gables, obelisks, monoliths and castles standing out boldly against the sky, with bastion and mural surmounted by fretted cornice and every interstice and chasm reflecting a sheen of scintillating light and deep blue shadow, making a combination of color, dazzling, startling and enchanting.
The day on which the professor made his first visit was warm, and back of the broad, waving bosom of
44
DESCRIPTION OF MUIR GLACIER.
the glacier water-streams were outspread in a com- plicated network, each in its own frictionless channel cutting down through the porous, decaying ice, of the surface into the quick and living blue, and flow- ing with a grace of motion and a ring and gurgle, flashing a light to be found only on the crystal hills and dales of the Glacier. Along the sides, he could see the mighty flood of ice grinding against the granite with tremendous pressure, rounding the out- swelling points, deepening and smoothing the retreating hollows, and shaping every portion of the mountain walls into the forms they were meant to have when, in the fullness of appointed time, the ice-tool should be lifted and set aside by the sun. Back two or three miles from the front, the current is probably about twelve hundred feet deep; but when we examine the walls, the grooved and rounded features plainly show that, in the earlier days of the ice age, they were all overswept, and this Glacier flowed at a depth of from three to four thousand feet above its present level.
Prof. Horace Briggs thus describes this wonderful frozen river:
"It is forty miles long, and back on the land, in a basin of the mountains, being re-enforced by fifteen tributaries coming down the glens from different points of the compass, it swells to an icy sea twenty- five miles in diameter. Thence it moves with resist- less power, bearing rocks and long lines of detritus on its billowy surface. Just before it reaches the Bay, it is compressed by two sentinel mountains, and is forced through a gorge over one mile in width. Emerging from this narrow gateway, it moves on, at the rate of sixty feet a day, to the waters whence it
45
DESCRIPTION OF MUIR GLACIER.
originally came, buttressing the Bay with a perpen- dicular wall a thousand feet high, three hundred feet of ultramarine crystals tipped with purest white being above the surface, and, being pushed beyond its support in the underlying rock, a battle begins between cohesion and gravity. The latter force always prevails, and vast masses break from the gla- cial torrent with the combined crash of falling walls and heavy thunder, and tumble into the Bay with a dash and a shock that agitates the waters miles away, making navigation perilous to craft of all sizes. The almost deafening roar made when these masses are rent away, the splashing baptism they receive in their fall and the leaping waters, are lively witnesses to the birth of an iceberg, which henceforth, as an independent existence, goes on girding the shores, butting against its fellows, and scaring navigators. While the ship was resting unmoored near the front of this icy barrier, we were startled by the sudden appearance of a mass of dark crystal, vastly larger than our own ship, shooting up from the depths, and tossing our steamer as if it were an egg-shell. As the vessel careened, the frightened passengers were sent whirling against each other, over chairs or pros- trate upon the deck. This strange visitor had doubt- less been broken off from the roots of the icy moun- tain, hundreds of feet below the surface, and hence had unexpectedly appeared upon the scene. Had it struck the ship fairly, nothing but a miracle could have saved us. Having recovered somewhat from our amazement, about twenty of us were sent on shore in the Captain's gig. Landing some distance below the ice-wall, we climbed over a hundred feet up a lateral moraine, crawled shoe-deep in wet gravel
46
DESCRIPTION OF MUIR GLACIER.
down into the valley of a glacial river, forded it, paddled through glacial mud covered with a shingle of slime just deep enough to hide the creamy pools, slipped prostrate upon ice made treacherous by a thin disguise of detritus, and barked our shins and cut our shoes on the sharp, angular blocks of granite and basalt strewn for miles, in great profusion, along our perilous route.
" Blocks of finest marble hedged our pathway; we trod upon chips of jasper and chalcedony, the product of different mountains far up on the Peninsula, and we passed two exquisitely beautiful boulders of veined porphyry weighing two or three hundred pounds each, rounded and polished by centuries of attrition. They were of dark purple, streaked with quartz spotlessly white, very desirable specimens for a cabinet or for out-door ornamentation. After more than an hour of plunging and sprawling, and of pull- ing each other out of the grey mire, about half of our number reached the uncovered glacier. At the first glance we felt that here we should stand with uncovered heads, for we were in the presence of the marvelous manifestations of superhuman power in action, and looked with unveiled eyes upon the potent agencies by which much of this planet has been fashioned. Away in the distance was the white lake fed by numerous frozen rivers, and these rivers were born of mountain snows fifty miles distant. The white-robed mountains themselves, aeons of the past, were smoothed and grooved far up their flinty sides, when this same glacier was three-fold deeper, and many times more ponderous and mighty than it is to-day. Stretched along the base of the mountains to where they are only a line in the distance, were
PHOTO ENG DO MY.
CREVASSE ON TOP OF MUIR GLACIER. From photograph 7966, by PARTRIDGE, Portland, Ore.
47
DESCRIPTION OF MUIR GLACIER.
the records of those grey old years in the form of moraines, one hundred feet high, and appearing like a range of hills. The larger portion of this crystal river, perhaps an eighth of a mile in width, is heaved into rounded hills and beetling precipices, quite resembling the sea in a storm, while the mid- dle and much of the wider part is splintered into countless spires and needles and pinnacles, ten, twenty and thirty feet in height, and of a beautiful ultramarine at the base, shaded to a pure white at the summit. In the onward march of the Glacier, these pinnacles are occasionally wrenched from their seats in the solid ice beneath, they nod, then totter, and then make a plunge, and are shattered into a cloud of acicular crystals that sparkle like the frosted snow under a full moon of a winter's night, only with more of color; they are diamonds on the wing. Again, the whole surface is riven by a thousand crevasses, along the bottom of which streams of clear water find their way, often broken by waterfalls that plunge farther down into the dark blue abysses out of sight. These chasms are frightful gaps to one peering down a hundred feet or more between their turquoise walls. A slip, a frail alpenstock, a feeble grasp of the guide's rope, and gravity would close the scene without further ceremony. The molecular structure of the glacier is continually changing, ad- justing itself to the elevation and depressions of its rocky bed, and hence there is an incessant clicking and crackling, interrupted here and there by an explosion, heard over every inch of the surface. The whole scene is weird, and strange in sight and sound -in the voices that rise in the air from the azure depths-fascinating because every step is perilous,
.
48
DESCRIPTION OF MUIR GLACIER.
majestic from its massiveness, and awful because its march is irresistible. Consider what a force in wear- ing away mountains and glens an icy torrent must be, more than one mile wide, almost a thousand feet deep, and in the middle flowing about seventy feet a day. It goes grinding, and groaning, and cracking in startling explosions, all mingled in a loud wail like that from the Titans imprisoned under Mt. Atna. Now let any one in fancy frame for himself this picture:
"Snow-capped mountains in the background, two of them, Fairweather and Crillon, more than 15,000 feet high, thick set with glittering peaks and clear cut as silhouettes on a dark sky; the great Glacier, child of Arctic snows, turreted and pinnacled, and splintered into a thousand strange forms, upon which Iris has flung the varied hues of amethyst, turquoise and sapphire; huge masses riven from the crystal river with a thundering roar, reeling and toppling into an amber sea, thickly dotted with new-born and vagrant icebergs, and all this scene glorified and transfigured by the setting sun. Looking upon this picture through the creative power of imagination, one can readily conceive that the enraptured tourist, standing in the presence of the realities, would call that day spent with the Muir Glacier, the day of all days he ever passed in gazing upon and listening to the wild wonders of our planet."
All contemporary authorities coincide as to the grandeur and extent of the Muir Glacier. The evi- dence of the more recent visitors is not only corrobo- rative of that of Muir and the early explorers fol- lowing him, but becomes so enthusiastic that it would seem to run to exaggeration were exaggera-
49
DISCHARGE OF THE MUIR.
tion possible to the beholder of one of the grandest and most awe-inspiring spectacles of the power of natural forces.
Rev. Thomas Rogers, of Rochester, New York, in describing the Muir Glacier, designates it, a "frozen Niagara." He particularizes that great congealed cataract as stretched across the neck of Glacier Bay, a distance of several thousand feet, and rising per- pendicularly a distance of three hundred feet, and extending below the water about seven hundred feet.
Prof. Frederick G. Wright, of Oberlin, Ohio, esti- mates that the ice-discharge of the Muir Glacier into the waters of Glacier Bay is 140,000,000 cubic feet of the clearest ice in every twenty-four hours.
Kate Field, whose great descriptive powers are so well known, says that no pen can do justice to the grandeur of a glacier like the Muir, as all become spell-bound at its majestic and irresistible force and indescribable beauty.
"Imagine," says she, "Niagara Falls frozen a solid wall of ice, three hundred feet high, moving toward the ocean at the rate of eighty feet a day, and a similar wall six or seven hundred feet under water and the whole mass cracking and giving forth peals of thunder that rival the heavenly artillery, and every few moments thousands of tons of lovely blue ice, crashing into the sea and starting on a voyage as icebergs-a peril to the Arctic voyager-and you will have some slight conception of this imposing spectacle."
No important glaciers are found in the Rocky Mountains which is anomalous, considering the great height of that range. A few small glaciers, however, are found in the Wind River range in
50
SOME SOUTHERN GLACIERS.
Wyoming and near the headwaters of the Flathead, in Montana. The most southern series of glaciers in the Sierra Nevadas are in Tuolumne and Mono Counties, just east of the valley of the Yosemite. The greatest of these, however, is not over a mile in length and none extend below an altitude of 11,000 feet. The next glaciers of any importance are on Mt. Shasta, California, and then in the Cascade Range in Washington, particularly on Mt. Tacoma. The waters of the Cowlitz, the Nisqually, the Puy- allup and White Rivers originate in glaciers high up in the flanks of the mountains. From Mt. Tacoma northward the glaciers increase in size and number through the Coast Range of British Colum- bia and southern Alaska to the Mt. St. Elias Range of Mountains. It is not, however, until the Stikine River in Alaska is reached-in latitude 57°-that glaciers become easily accessible and of size suffic- ient to warrant study. The water emptying into the Sound from Stikine River is highly charged with glacial mud-a sort of "float," as a mining pros- pector would call it, which acts as a guide to the gla- cier above, but the greatest of the glaciers in this vicinity has not, at this writing, been fully explored. A party of Russian officers made the attempt a num- ber of years ago, and none returned to tell the tale.
Not the least interesting of the world's glaciers are those of Greenland, one of the great unknown lands of the earth. The area of Greenland is estimated at 500,000 square miles, and the whole of this broad expanse, except a narrow border at the southern end, is one vast sheet of moving ice, pushing onward to- ward the sea. Nordenskiold, the great Arctic explorer, believed that a portion of the interior of
51
NORDENSKIOLD'S THEORY.
Greenland was free from ice and might be inhabited, and in 1883 made the attempt to penetrate the mys- tery. He ventured for a distance of one hundred and fifty miles, at about five thousand feet above sea-level; from here he sent two Eskimo on a kind of ice-shoe, known as a skidor. These Indians went about seventy miles further, to an altitude of about six thousand feet. They found the ice rising in terraces and seemingly boundless beyond, and as further penetration was impossible, the explorer abandoned his project, and Greenland remains, so far as Science has demonstrated to the contrary, one great continent of shifting, rushing ice.
It may be said that there is scarcely a section of the known world that is free from living, or the evi- dence of pre-existing glaciers. There are known glaciers to-day on the island of Spitzbergen, in Nor- way and Sweden, in central Europe, in Southern Asia, in Patagonia, in Chili and New Zealand, and all over North America are scattered the plain and unmistakable evidences of glacial action. There are over four hundred identified glaciers in the Alps, between Mt. Blanc and the Tyrol, covering an area of 1,400 square miles and in places of a thickness of six hundred feet. The line of perpetual snow in the Alps is seven thousand five hundred feet above sea- level, and the glaciers extend as low down as four thousand feet. According to data collected by various scientists, these ice bodies have enlarged and diminished at various periods and still continue to thus expand and contract. The Scandinavian glacier snow-fields cover an area of five thousand square miles. From the snow plateau of Justedal alone- which covers an area of five hundred and eighty
52
MORAINES.
square miles-there descends twenty-four glaciers toward the North German Sea.
The great North American ice-sheet of the glacial era would seem from the deductions of science to have had an independent movement in various por- tions of the continent, and an interesting evidence of this is quoted in the drift region of south- western Wisconsin and parts of Illinois, Iowa and Minnesota, which must have remained an island while all around it was ice. All the evidences go to show that this particular area escaped the attrition that was going on all around it by the pressure and movement of ponderous bodies of ice.
In this connection a few words about "Moraines " may be pertinent. A "Moraine," as defined geo- logically, is: " A line of blocks and gravel extending along the sides of separate glaciers formed by the union of one or more separate ones." As showing that the depressions of the Sierra Nevada-those depressions that make channels in a westerly direction, whether they consist of a gulch, a ravine, a canyon, a river-course or a dead and extinct river, are moraines; simple observation is all that is necessary, and, this being granted, it must follow that at one time the Sierra Nevada Range was a great bed of glaciers, and that it is the attrition of these great glacial forces that has stored the sides of these courses with gravel and cobbles that have been ground from great boulders, which, in their time, had been detached in masses, smaller or larger, from deep-set rocks, from a period anterior to that of the Glacial. Every prospector who ever swung a poll-pick or delved for gold in the ravines, gulches, bars, flats or streams of California, recognizes the
Britton & Rey,
GLACIAL EROSIONO N MOUNTAIN-MUIR GLACIER. Effect as shown 1000 feet above the sea level.
53
MORAINES.
moraine as the deposition from some powerful force moving irresistibly from above, but did not recognize it by the name of moraine, because that was too scientific for the most of them. In the main they attributed the evident attrition to the action of water from the melting snows at the summits; but, even to the amateur geologist, and, in fact, to any intelli- gent student of the subject, there is a difference in the character of the detrius which comes down from the action of the water-shed, and the material which forms the moraine. The one shows either a pol- ished surface in pieces in size from a cobble upwards, while the smaller particles show a distinct polishing plainly attributable to the action of water, and the smallest are merely disintegrations caused by wash- ing. The material of the moraine in most cases shows a striated surface as if subjected to a simul- taneous pushing and grinding action, evidently the effect of the friction of solid or semi-solid matter, and the smaller or movable stones are ground and pol- ished as smooth as glass. Terminal moraines clearly traced to glacial action are found all over the conti- ment, as well as "kettle" moraines, the latter being most prominent in the State of Wisconsin. The Missouri River, that great channel from the moun- tains to the sea, shows a moraine plainly along its banks in its upper portions, and from this fact it was once thought that a distinct line of terminal moraine might be traced across the continent. Professors G. Frederick Wright and H. Carvill Lewis made the attempt to verify this theory in 1881, and began the survey in Pennsylvania, but, on crossing the Alle- ghanies and reaching the Mississippi Valley, con- tinuity ceased and nothing was found but marginal
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