In This Eastern Arm Of Sum Dum Bay And Its Yosemite Branch, I Counted
From My Canoe, On My Way
Up and down, thirty small glaciers back of
the walls, and we saw three of the first order; also thirty-
Seven
cascades and falls, counting only those large enough to make
themselves heard several miles. The whole bay, with its rocks and
woods and ice, reverberates with their roar. How many glaciers may be
disclosed in the other great arm that I have not seen as yet, I
cannot say, but, judging from the bergs it sends down, I guess not
less than a hundred pour their turbid streams into the fiord, making
about as many joyful, bouncing cataracts.
About noon we began to retrace our way back into the main fiord, and
arrived at the gold-mine camp after dark, rich and weary.
On the morning of August 21 I set out with my three Indians to
explore the right arm of this noble bay, Mr. Young having decided, on
account of mission work, to remain at the gold-mine. So here is
another fine lot of Sum Dum ice, - thirty-five or forty square miles
of bergs, one great glacier of the first class descending into the
fiord at the head, the fountain whence all these bergs were derived,
and thirty-one smaller glaciers that do not reach tidewater; also
nine cascades and falls, large size, and two rows of Yosemite rocks
from three to four thousand feet high, each row about eighteen or
twenty miles long, burnished and sculptured in the most telling
glacier style, and well trimmed with spruce groves and flower
gardens; a' that and more of a kind that cannot here be catalogued.
For the first five or six miles there is nothing excepting the
icebergs that is very striking in the scenery as compared with that
of the smooth unencumbered outside channels, where all is so evenly
beautiful. The mountain-wall on the right as you go up is more
precipitous than usual, and a series of small glaciers is seen along
the top of it, extending their blue-crevassed fronts over the rims of
pure-white snow fountains, and from the end of each front a hearty
stream coming in a succession of falls and rapids over the terminal
moraines, through patches of dwarf willows, and then through the
spruce woods into the bay, singing and dancing all the way down. On
the opposite side of the bay from here there is a small side bay
about three miles deep, with a showy group of glacier-bearing
mountains back of it. Everywhere else the view is bounded by
comparatively low mountains densely forested to the very top.
After sailing about six miles from the mine, the experienced
mountaineer could see some evidence of an opening from this wide
lower portion, and on reaching it, it proved to be the continuation
of the main west arm, contracted between stupendous walls of gray
granite, and crowded with bergs from shore to shore, which seem to
bar the way against everything but wings. Headland after headland, in
most imposing array, was seen plunging sheer and bare from dizzy
heights, and planting its feet in the ice-encumbered water without
leaving a spot on which one could land from a boat, while no part of
the great glacier that pours all these miles of ice into the fiord
was visible. Pushing our way slowly through the packed bergs, and
passing headland after headland, looking eagerly forward, the glacier
and its fountain mountains were still beyond sight, cut off by other
projecting headland capes, toward which I urged my way, enjoying the
extraordinary grandeur of the wild unfinished Yosemite. Domes swell
against the sky in fine lines as lofty and as perfect in form as
those of the California valley, and rock-fronts stand forward, as
sheer and as nobly sculptured. No ice-work that I have ever seen
surpasses this, either in the magnitude of the features or
effectiveness of composition.
On some of the narrow benches and tables of the walls rows of spruce
trees and two-leaved pines were growing, and patches of considerable
size were found on the spreading bases of those mountains that stand
back inside the canyons, where the continuity of the walls is broken.
Some of these side canyons are cut down to the level of the water and
reach far back, opening views into groups of glacier fountains that
give rise to many a noble stream; while all along the tops of the
walls on both sides small glaciers are seen, still busily engaged in
the work of completing their sculpture. I counted twenty-five from
the canoe. Probably the drainage of fifty or more pours into this
fiord. The average elevation at which they melt is about eighteen
hundred feet above sea-level, and all of them are residual branches
of the grand trunk that filled the fiord and overflowed its walls
when there was only one Sum Dum glacier.
The afternoon was wearing away as we pushed on and on through the
drifting bergs without our having obtained a single glimpse of the
great glacier. A Sum Dum seal-hunter, whom we met groping his way
deftly through the ice in a very small, unsplitable cottonwood canoe,
told us that the ice-mountain was yet fifteen miles away. This was
toward the middle of the afternoon, and I gave up sketching and
making notes and worked hard with the Indians to reach it before
dark. About seven o'clock we approached what seemed to be the extreme
head of the fiord, and still no great glacier in sight - only a small
one, three or four miles long, melting a thousand feet above the sea.
Presently, a narrow side opening appeared between tremendous cliffs
sheer to a height of four thousand feet or more, trending nearly at
right angles to the general trend of the fiord, and apparently
terminated by a cliff, scarcely less abrupt or high, at a distance of
a mile or two.
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