When We Arrived At The Hoona Hunting-Camp, Men, Women, And Children
Came Swarming Out To Welcome Us.
In the neighborhood of this camp I
carefully noted the lines of demarkation between the forested and
deforested regions.
Several mountains here are only in part
deforested, and the lines separating the bare and the forested
portions are well defined. The soil, as well as the trees, had slid
off the steep slopes, leaving the edge of the woods raw-looking and
rugged.
At the mouth of the bay a series of moraine islands show that the
trunk glacier that occupied the bay halted here for some time and
deposited this island material as a terminal moraine; that more of
the bay was not filled in shows that, after lingering here, it
receded comparatively fast. All the level portions of trunks of
glaciers occupying ocean fiords, instead of melting back gradually in
times of general shrinking and recession, as inland glaciers with
sloping channels do, melt almost uniformly over all the surface until
they become thin enough to float. Then, of course, with each rise and
fall of the tide, the sea water, with a temperature usually
considerably above the freezing-point, rushes in and out beneath
them, causing rapid waste of the nether surface, while the upper is
being wasted by the weather, until at length the fiord portions of
these great glaciers become comparatively thin and weak and are
broken up and vanish almost simultaneously.
Glacier Bay is undoubtedly young as yet.
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