My Sled Was About Three Feet Long
And Made As Light As Possible.
A sack of hardtack, a little tea and
sugar, and a sleeping-bag were firmly lashed on it so that nothing
could drop off however much it might be jarred and dangled in
crossing crevasses.
Two Indians carried the baggage over the rocky moraine to the clear
glacier at the side of one of the eastern Nunatak Islands. Mr. Loomis
accompanied me to this first camp and assisted in dragging the empty
sled over the moraine. We arrived at the middle Nunatak Island about
nine o'clock. Here I sent back my Indian carriers, and Mr. Loomis
assisted me the first day in hauling the loaded sled to my second
camp at the foot of Hemlock Mountain, returning the next morning.
July 13. I skirted the mountain to eastward a few miles and was
delighted to discover a group of trees high up on its ragged rocky
side, the first trees I had seen on the shores of Glacier Bay or on
those of any of its glaciers. I left my sled on the ice and climbed
the mountain to see what I might learn. I found that all the trees
were mountain hemlock (Tsuga mertensiana), and were evidently the
remnant of an old well-established forest, standing on the only
ground that was stable, all the rest of the forest below it having
been sloughed off with the soil from the disintegrating slate bed
rock. The lowest of the trees stood at an elevation of about two
thousand feet above the sea, the highest at about three thousand
feet or a little higher. Nothing could be more striking than the
contrast between the raw, crumbling, deforested portions of the
mountain, looking like a quarry that was being worked, and the
forested part with its rich, shaggy beds of cassiope and bryanthus
in full bloom, and its sumptuous cushions of flower-enameled mosses.
These garden-patches are full of gay colors of gentian, erigeron,
anemone, larkspur, and columbine, and are enlivened with happy birds
and bees and marmots. Climbing to an elevation of twenty-five hundred
feet, which is about fifteen hundred feet above the level of the
glacier at this point, I saw and heard a few marmots, and three
ptarmigans that were as tame as barnyard fowls. The sod is sloughing
off on the edges, keeping it ragged. The trees are storm-bent from
the southeast. A few are standing at an elevation of nearly three
thousand feet; at twenty-five hundred feet, pyrola, veratrum,
vaccinium, fine grasses, sedges, willows, mountain-ash, buttercups,
and acres of the most luxuriant cassiope are in bloom.
A lake encumbered with icebergs lies at the end of Divide Glacier. A
spacious, level-floored valley beyond it, eight or ten miles long,
with forested mountains on its west side, perhaps discharges to the
southeastward into Lynn Canal. The divide of the glacier is about
opposite the third of the eastern tributaries. Another berg-dotted
lake into which the drainage of the Braided Glacier flows, lies a few
miles to the westward and is one and a half miles long. Berg Lake is
next the remarkable Girdled Glacier to the southeastward.
When the ice-period was in its prime, much of the Muir Glacier that
now flows northward into Howling Valley flowed southward into Glacier
Bay as a tributary of the Muir. All the rock contours show this, and
so do the medial moraines. Berg Lake is crowded with bergs because
they have no outlet and melt slowly. I heard none discharged. I had a
hard time crossing the Divide Glacier, on which I camped. Half a mile
back from the lake I gleaned a little fossil wood and made a fire on
moraine boulders for tea. I slept fairly well on the sled. I heard
the roar of four cascades on a shaggy green mountain on the west side
of Howling Valley and saw three wild goats fifteen hundred feet up in
the steep grassy pastures.
July 14. I rose at four o'clock this cloudy and dismal morning and
looked for my goats, but saw only one. I thought there must be wolves
where there were goats, and in a few minutes heard their low, dismal,
far-reaching howling. One of them sounded very near and came nearer
until it seemed to be less than a quarter of a mile away on the edge
of the glacier. They had evidently seen me, and one or more had come
down to observe me, but I was unable to catch sight of any of them.
About half an hour later, while I was eating breakfast, they began
howling again, so near I began to fear they had a mind to attack
me, and I made haste to the shelter of a big square boulder, where,
though I had no gun, I might be able to defend myself from a front
attack with my alpenstock. After waiting half an hour or so to see
what these wild dogs meant to do, I ventured to proceed on my journey
to the foot of Snow Dome, where I camped for the night.
There are six tributaries on the northwest side of Divide arm,
counting to the Gray Glacier, next after Granite Canyon Glacier going
northwest. Next is Dirt Glacier, which is dead. I saw bergs on the
edge of the main glacier a mile back from here which seem to have
been left by the draining of a pool in a sunken hollow. A circling
rim of driftwood, back twenty rods on the glacier, marks the edge
of the lakelet shore where the bergs lie scattered and stranded. It
is now half past ten o'clock and getting dusk as I sit by my little
fossil-wood fire writing these notes. A strange bird is calling and
complaining. A stream is rushing into a glacier well on the edge of
which I am camped, back a few yards from the base of the mountain for
fear of falling stones.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 78 of 84
Words from 78790 to 79801
of 85542
