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. I saw a
few plants anchored in the less crumbling parts of the steep-faced
bosses and steps - parnassia, potentilla, hedysarum, lutkea, etc. The
lower, rough-looking patches half way up the mountain are mostly
alder bushes ten or fifteen feet high. I had a fine view of the top
of the mountain-mass which forms the boundary wall of the upper
portion of the inlet on the west side, and of several glaciers,
tributary to the first of the eastern tributaries of the main Muir
Glacier. Five or six of these tributaries were seen, most of them now
melted off from the trunk and independent.
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