an interesting old salt, every sentence
of his conversation flavored with sea-brine, bluff and hearty
as a sea-wave, keen-eyed, courageous, self-reliant,
and so stubbornly skeptical he refused to believe even in glaciers.
"After you see your bark," I said, "and find everything
being done to your mind, you had better go on to Alaska and see
the glaciers."
"Oh, I haf seen many glaciers already."
"But are you sure that you know what a glacier is?"
I asked.
"Vell, a glacier is a big mountain all covered up vith ice."
"Then a river," said I, "must be a big mountain
all covered with water."
I explained what a glacier was and succeeded in exciting his interest.
I told him he must reform, for a man who neither believed in God
nor glaciers must be very bad, indeed the worst of all unbelievers.
At Port Townsend I met Mr. Loomis, who had agreed to go with me
as far as the Muir Glacier. We sailed from here on the steamer
Queen. We touched again at Victoria, and I took a short walk into
the adjacent woods and gardens and found the flowery vegetation
in its glory, especially the large wild rose for which the region
is famous, and the spiraea and English honeysuckle of the gardens.
June 18. We sailed from Victoria on the Queen at 10.30
A.M.
The weather all the way to Fort Wrangell was cloudy and rainy,
but the scenery is delightful even in the dullest weather. The
marvelous wealth of forests, islands, and waterfalls, the cloud
wreathed heights, the many avalanche slopes and slips, the pearl-gray
tones of the sky, the browns of the woods, their purple flower
edges and mist fringes, the endless combinations of water and
land and ever shifting clouds-none of these greatly interest the
tourists. I noticed one of the small whales that frequent these
channels and mentioned the fact, then called attention to a charming
group of islands, but they turned their eyes from the islands,
saying, "Yes, yes, they are very fine, but where did you
see the whale?"
The timber is larger and apparently better every way as you go
north from Victoria, that is on the islands, perhaps on account
of fires from less rain to the southward. All the islands have
been overswept by the ice-sheet and are but little changed
as yet, save a few of the highest summits which have been sculptured
by local residual glaciers. All have approximately the form
of greatest strength with reference to the overflow of an ice-sheet,
excepting those mentioned above, which have been more or less
eroded by local residual glaciers. Every channel also has the
form of greatest strength with reference to ice-action. Islands,
as we have seen, are still being born in Glacier Bay and elsewhere
to the northward.
I found many pleasant people aboard, but strangely ignorant on
the subject of earth-sculpture and landscape-making.
Professor Niles, of the Boston Institute of Technology, is aboard;
also Mr. Russell and Mr. Kerr of the Geological Survey, who are
now on their way to Mt. St. Elias, hoping to reach the summit;
and a granddaughter of Peter Burnett, the first governor of California.
We arrived at Wrangell in the rain at 10.30 P.M.
There was a grand
rush on shore to buy curiosities and see totem poles. The shops
were jammed and mobbed, high prices paid for shabby stuff manufactured
expressly for tourist trade. Silver bracelets hammered out of
dollars and half dollars by Indian smiths are the most popular
articles, then baskets, yellow cedar toy canoes, paddles, etc.
Most people who travel look only at what they are directed to
look at. Great is the power of the guidebook-maker, however
ignorant. I inquired for my old friends Tyeen and Shakes, who
were both absent.
June 20. We left Wrangell early this morning and passed through
the Wrangell Narrows at high tide.
I noticed a few bergs
near Cape Fanshawe from Wrangell Glacier. The water ten miles
from Wrangell is colored with particles derived mostly from the
Stickeen River glaciers and Le Conte Glacier. All the waters of
the channels north of Wrangell are green or yellowish from glacier
erosion. We had a good view of the glaciers all the way to Juneau,
but not of their high, cloud-veiled fountains. The stranded
bergs on the moraine bar at the mouth of Sum Dum Bay looked just
as they did when I first saw them ten years ago.
Before reaching Juneau, the Queen proceeded up the Taku Inlet
that the passengers might see the fine glacier at its head, and
ventured to within half a mile of the berg-discharging front,
which is about three quarters of a mile wide. Bergs fell but seldom,
perhaps one in half an hour. The glacier makes a rapid descent
near the front. The inlet, therefore, will not be much extended
beyond its present limit by the recession of the glacier. The
grand rocks on either side of its channel show ice-action
in telling style. The Norris Glacier, about two miles below the
Taku is a good example of a glacier in the first stage of decadence.
The Taku River enters the head of the inlet a little to the east
of the glaciers, coming from beyond the main coast range. All
the tourists are delighted at seeing a grand glacier in the flesh.
The scenery is very fine here and in the channel at Juneau. On
Douglas Island there is a large mill of 240 stamps, all run by
one small water-wheel, which, however, is acted on by water
at enormous pressure. The forests
around the mill are being
rapidly nibbled away. Wind is here said to be very violent at
times, blowing away people and houses and sweeping scud far up
the mountain-side. Winter snow is seldom more than a foot
or two deep.
June 21. We arrived at Douglas Island at five in the afternoon
and went sight-seeing through the mill. Six hundred tons of
low-grade quartz are crushed per day. Juneau, on the mainland
opposite the Douglas Island mills, is quite a village, well supplied
with stores, churches, etc. A dance-house in which Indians
are supposed to show native dances of all sorts is perhaps the
best-patronized of all the places of amusement. A Mr. Brooks,
who prints a paper here, gave us some information on Mt. St. Elias,
Mt. Wrangell, and the Cook Inlet and Prince William Sound region.
He told Russell that he would never reach the summit of St. Elias,
that it was inaccessible. He saw no glaciers that discharged bergs
into the sea at Cook Inlet, but many in Prince William Sound.
June 22. Leaving Juneau at noon, we had a good view of
the Auk Glacier at the mouth of the channel between Douglas Island
and the mainland, and of Eagle Glacier a few miles north of the
Auk on the east side of Lynn Canal. Then the Davidson Glacier
came in sight, finely curved, striped with medial moraines, and
girdled in front by its magnificent tree-fringed terminal moraine;
and besides these many others of every size and pattern on the
mountains
bounding Lynn Canal, most of them comparatively
small, completing their sculpture. The mountains on either hand
and at the head of the canal are strikingly beautiful at any time
of the year. The sky to-day is mostly clear, with just clouds
enough hovering about the mountains to show them to best advantage
as they stretch onward in sustained grandeur like two separate
and distinct ranges, each mountain with its glaciers and clouds
and fine sculpture glowing bright in smooth, graded light. Only
a few of them exceed five thousand feet in height; but as one
naturally associates great height with ice-and-snow-laden
mountains and with glacial sculpture so pronounced, they seem
much higher. There are now two canneries at the head of Lynn Canal.
The Indians furnish some of the salmon at ten cents each. Everybody
sits up to see the midnight sky. At this time of the year there
is no night here, though the sun drops a degree or two below the
horizon. One may read at twelve o'clock San Francisco time.
June 23. Early this morning we arrived in Glacier Bay.
We passed through crowds of bergs at the mouth of the bay, though,
owing to wind and tide, there were but few at the front of Muir
Glacier. A fine, bright day, the last of a group of a week or
two, as shown by the dryness of the sand along the shore and on
the moraine-rare weather hereabouts. Most of the passengers went
ashore and climbed the morame on the east side to get a view of
the glacier from a point a little higher than the top of the front
wall.
A few ventured on a mile or two farther. The day was
delightful, and our one hundred and eighty passengers were happy,
gazing at the beautiful blue of the bergs and the shattered pinnacled
crystal wall, awed by the thunder and commotion of the falling
and rising ice bergs, which ever and anon sent spray flying several
hundred feet into the air and raised swells that set all the fleet
of bergs in motion and roared up the beach, telling the story
of the birth of every iceberg far and near. The number discharged
varies much, influenced in part no doubt by the tides and weather
and seasons, sometimes one every five minutes for half a day at
a time on the average, though intervals of twenty or thirty minutes
may occur without any considerable fall, then three or four immense
discharges will take place in as many minutes. The sound they
make is like heavy thunder, with a prolonged roar after deep thudding
sounds-a perpetual thunderstorm easily heard three or four miles
away. The roar in our tent and the shaking of the ground one or
two miles distant from points of discharge seems startlingly near.
I had to look after camp-supplies and left the ship late
this morning, going with a crowd to the glacier; then, taking
advantage of the fine weather, I pushed off alone into the silent
icy prairie to the east, to Nunatak Island, about five hundred
feet above the ice. I discovered a small lake on the larger of
the two islands, and many battered and ground fragments of fossil
wood, large and small. They seem to have come from trees that
grew on the island perhaps centuries ago. I mean to use this island
as a station in setting
out stakes to measure the glacial
flow. The top of Mt. Fairweather is in sight at a distance of
perhaps thirty miles, the ice all smooth on the eastern border,
wildly broken in the central portion. I reached the ship at 2.30
P.M.
I had intended getting back at noon and sending
letters and bidding friends good-bye, but could not resist
this glacier saunter. The ship moved off as soon as I was seen
on the moraine bluff, and Loomis and I waved our hats in farewell
to the many wavings of handkerchiefs of acquaintances we had made
on the trip.
Our goods--blankets, provisions, tent, etc.--lay in a rocky moraine
hollow within a mile of the great terminal wall of the glacier,
and the discharge of the rising and falling icebergs kept up an
almost continuous thundering and echoing, while a few gulls flew
about on easy wing or stood like specks of foam on the shore.
These were our neighbors.
After my twelve-mile walk, I ate a cracker and planned the
camp. I found that one of my boxes had been left on the steamer,
but still we have more than enough of everything. We obtained
two cords of dry wood at Juneau which Captain Carroll kindly had
his men carry up the moraine to our camp-ground. We piled
the wood as a wind-break, then laid a floor of lumber brought
from Seattle for a square tent, nine feet by nine. We set the
tent, stored our provisions in it, and made our beds. This work
was done by 11.30 P.M.,
good daylight lasting to this time. We
slept well in our roomy cotton house, dreaming of California home
nests in the wilderness of ice.
June 25. A rainy day. For a few hours I kept count of the
number of bergs discharged, then sauntered along the beach to
the end of the crystal wall. A portion of the way is dangerous,
the moraine bluff being capped by an overlying lobe of the glacier,
which as it melts sends down boulders and fragments of ice, while
the strip of sandy shore at high tide is only a few rods wide,
leaving but little room to escape from the falling moraine material
and the berg-waves. The view of the ice-cliffs, pinnacles,
spires and ridges was very telling, a magnificent picture of nature's
power and industry and love of beauty. About a hundred or a hundred
and fifty feet from the shore a large stream issues from an arched,
tunnel-like channel in the wall of the glacier, the blue
of the ice hall being of an exquisite tone, contrasting with the
strange, sooty, smoky, brown-colored stream. The front wall
of the Muir Glacier is about two and a half or three miles wide.
Only the central portion about two miles wide discharges icebergs.
The two wings advanced over the washed and stratified moraine
deposits have little or no motion, melting and receding as fast,
or perhaps faster, than it advances. They have been advanced at
least a mile over the old re-formed moraines, as is shown
by the overlying, angular, recent moraine deposits, now being
laid down, which are continuous with the medial moraines of the
glacier.
In the old stratified moraine banks, trunks and branches of trees
showing but little sign of decay occur at a height of about a
hundred feet above tide-water.
I have not yet compared this
fossil wood with that of the opposite shore deposits. That the
glacier was once withdrawn considerably back of its present limit
seems plain. Immense torrents of water had filled in the inlet
with stratified moraine-material, and for centuries favorable
climatic conditions allowed forests to grow upon it. At length
the glacier advanced, probably three or four miles, uprooting
and burying the trees which had grown undisturbed for centuries.
Then came a great thaw, which produced the flood that deposited
the uprooted trees. Also the trees which grew around the shores
above reach of floods were shed off, perhaps by the thawing of
the soil that was resting on the buried margin of the glacier,
left on its retreat and protected by a covering of moraine-material
from melting as fast as the exposed surface of the glacier. What
appear to be remnants of the margin of the glacier when it stood
at a much higher level still exist on the left side and probably
all along its banks on both sides just below its present terminus.
June 26. We fixed a mark on the left wing to measure the
motion if any. It rained all day, but I had a grand tramp over
mud, ice, and rock to the east wall of the inlet. Brown metamorphic
slate, close-grained in places, dips away from the inlet,
presenting edges to ice-action, which has given rise to a
singularly beautiful and striking surface, polished and grooved
and fluted.
All the next day it rained. The mountains were
smothered
in dull-colored mist and fog, the great glacier looming through
the gloomy gray fog fringes with wonderful effect. The thunder
of bergs booms and rumbles through the foggy atmosphere. It is
bad weather for exploring but delightful nevertheless, making
all the strange, mysterious region yet stranger and more mysterious.
June 28. A light rain. We were visited by two parties of
Indians. A man from each canoe came ashore, leaving the women
in the canoe to guard against the berg-waves. I tried my
Chinook and made out to say that I wanted to hire two of them
in a few days to go a little way back on the glacier and around
the bay. They are seal-hunters and promised to come again
with "Charley," who "hi yu kumtux wawa Boston"--knew
well how to speak English.
I saw three huge bergs born. Spray rose about two hundred feet.
Lovely reflections showed of the pale-blue tones of the ice-wall
and mountains in the calm water. Mirages are common, making the
stranded bergs along the shore look like the sheer frontal wall
of the glacier from which they were discharged.
I am watching the ice-wall, berg life and behavior, etc.
Yesterday and to-day a solitary small flycatcher was feeding
about camp. A sandpiper on the shore, loons, ducks, gulls, and
crows, a few of each, and a bald eagle are all the birds I have
noticed thus far. The glacier is thundering gloriously.
June 30. Clearing clouds and sunshine. In less than a minute
I saw three large bergs born. First there is usually a preliminary
thundering of comparatively small masses as the large mass begins
to fall, then the grand crash and boom and reverberating roaring.
Oftentimes three or four heavy main throbbing thuds and booming
explosions are heard as the main mass falls in several pieces,
and also secondary thuds and thunderings as the mass or masses
plunge and rise again and again ere they come to rest. Seldom,
if ever, do the towers, battlements, and pinnacles into which
the front of the glacier is broken fall forward headlong from
their bases like falling trees at the water-level or above or
below it. They mostly sink vertically or nearly so, as if undermined
by the melting action of the water of the inlet, occasionally
maintaining their upright position after sinking far below the
level of the water, and rising again a hundred feet or more into
the air with water streaming like hair down their sides from their
crowns, then launch forward and fall flat with yet another thundering
report, raising spray in magnificent, flamelike, radiating jets
and sheets, occasionally to the very top of the front wall. Illumined
by the sun, the spray and angular crystal masses are indescribably
beautiful. Some of the discharges pour in fragments from clefts
in the wall like waterfalls, white and mealy-looking, even
dusty with minute swirling ice-particles, followed by a rushing
succession of thunder-tones combining into a huge, blunt,
solemn roar. Most of these crumbling discharges are from the excessively
shattered central
part of the ice-wall; the solid deep-blue
masses from the ends of the wall forming the large bergs rise
from the bottom of the glacier.
Many lesser reports are heard at a distance of a mile or more
from the fall of pinnacles into crevasses or from the opening
of new crevasses. The berg discharges are very irregular, from
three to twenty-two an hour. On one rising tide, six hours,
there were sixty bergs discharged, large enough to thunder and
be heard at distances of from three quarters to one and a half
miles; and on one succeeding falling tide, six hours, sixty-nine
were discharged.
July 1. We were awakened at four o'clock this morning by
the whistle of the steamer George W. Elder. I went out on the
moraine and waved my hand in salute and was answered by a toot
from the whistle. Soon a party came ashore and asked if I was
Professor Muir. The leader, Professor Harry Fielding Reid of Cleveland,
Ohio, introduced himself and his companion, Mr. Cushing, also
of Cleveland, and six or eight young students who had come well
provided with instruments to study the glacier. They landed seven
or eight tons of freight and pitched camp beside ours. I am delighted
to have companions so congenial--we have now a village.
As I set out to climb the second mountain, three thousand feet
high, on the east side of the glacier, I met many tourists returning
from a walk on the smooth east margin of the glacier' and had
to answer many questions. I had a hard climb, but wonderful
views were developed and I sketched the glacier from this
high point and most of its upper fountains.
Many fine alpine plants grew here, an anemone on the summit, two
species of cassiope in shaggy mats, three or four dwarf willows,
large blue hairy lupines eighteen inches high, parnassia, phlox,
solidago, dandelion, white-flowered bryanthus, daisy, pedicularis,
epilobium, etc., with grasses, sedges, mosses, and lichens, forming
a delightful deep spongy sod. Woodchucks stood erect and piped
dolefully for an hour "Chee-chee!" with jaws absurdly
stretched to emit so thin a note-rusty-looking, seedy fellows,
also a smaller striped species which stood erect and cheeped and
whistled like a Douglas squirrel. I saw three or four species
of birds. A finch flew from her nest at my feet; and I almost
stepped on a family of young ptarmigan ere they scattered, little
bunches of downy brown silk, small but able to run well. They
scattered along a snow-bank, over boulders, through willows,
grass, and flowers, while the mother, very lame, tumbled and sprawled
at my feet. I stood still until the little ones began to peep;
the mother answered "Too-too-too" and showed
admirable judgment and devotion. She was in brown plumage with
white on the wing primaries. She had fine grounds on which to
lead and feed her young.
Not a cloud in the sky to-day; a faint film to the north
vanished by noon, leaving all the sky full of soft, hazy light.
The magnificent mountains around the widespread tributaries of
the glacier; the great, gently undulating, prairie-like expanse
of the main
trunk, bluish on the east, pure white on the
west and north; its trains of moraines in magnificent curving
lines and many colors--black, gray, red, and brown; the stormy,
cataract-like, crevassed sections; the hundred fountains;
the lofty, pure white Fairweather Range; the thunder of the plunging
bergs; the fleet of bergs sailing tranquilly in the inlet--formed
a glowing picture of nature's beauty and power.
July 2. I crossed the inlet with Mr. Reid and Mr. Adams
to-day. The stratified drift on the west side all the way
from top to base contains fossil wood. On the east side, as far
as I have seen it, the wood occurs only in one stratum at a height
of about a hundred and twenty feet in sand and clay. Some in a
bank of the west side are rooted in clay soil. I noticed a large
grove of stumps in a washed-out channel near the glacier-front
but had no time to examine closely Evidently a flood carrying
great quantities of sand and gravel had overwhelmed and broken
off these trees, leaving high stumps. The deposit, about a hundred
feet or more above them, had been recently washed out by one of
the draining streams of the glacier, exposing a part of the old
forest floor certainly two or three centuries old.
I climbed along the right bank of the lowest of the tributaries
and set a signal flag on a ridge fourteen hundred feet high. This
tributary is about one and a fourth or one and a half miles wide
and has four secondary tributaries. It reaches tide-water
but gives off no bergs. Later I climbed the large Nunatak
Island, seven thousand feet high, near the west margin of the
glacier. It is composed of crumbling granite draggled with washed
boulders, but has some enduring bosses which on sides and top
are polished and scored rigidly, showing that it had been heavily
overswept by the glacier when it was thousands of feet deeper
than now, like a submerged boulder in a river-channel. 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. lithe 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.
The highest peak to the eastward has an elevation of about five
thousand feet or a little less. I also had glorious views of the
Fairweather Range, La Pérouse, Crillon, Lituya, and Fairweather.
Mt. Fairweather is the most beautiful of all the giants that stand
guard about Glacier Bay. When the sun is shining on it from the
east or south its magnificent glaciers and colors are brought
out in most telling display. In the late afternoon its features
become less distinct. The atmosphere seems pale and hazy, though
around to the north and northeastward of Fairweather innumerable
white peaks are displayed, the highest fountain-heads of
the Muir Glacier crowded together in bewildering array, most exciting
and inviting to the mountaineer. Altogether I have had a delightful
day, a truly glorious celebration of the fourth.
July 6. I sailed three or four miles down the east coast
of the inlet with the Reid party's cook, who is supposed to be
an experienced camper and prospector, and landed at a stratified
moraine-bank. It was here that I camped in 1880, a point
at that time less than half a mile from the front of the glacier,
now one and a half miles. I found my Indian's old camp made just
ten years ago, and Professor Wright's of five years ago. Their
alder-bough beds and fireplace were still marked and but
little decayed. I found thirty-three species of plants in
flower, not counting willows-a showy garden on the shore only
a few feet above high tide, watered by a fine stream. Lutkea,
hedysarum,
parnassia, epilobium, bluebell, solidago, habenaria,
strawberry with fruit half grown, arctostaphylos, mertensia, erigeron,
willows, tall grasses and alder are the principal species. There
are many butterflies in this garden. Gulls are breeding near here.
I saw young in the water to-day.
On my way back to camp I discovered a group of monumental stumps
in a washed-out valley of the moraine and went ashore to
observe them. They are in the dry course of a flood-channel
about eighty feet above mean tide and four or five hundred yards
back from the shore, where they have been pounded and battered
by boulders rolling against them and over them, making them look
like gigantic shaving-brushes. The largest is about three feet
in diameter and probably three hundred years old. I mean to return
and examine them at leisure. A smaller stump, still firmly rooted,
is standing astride of an old crumbling trunk, showing that at
least two generations of trees flourished here undisturbed by
the advance or retreat of the glacier or by its draining stream-floods.
They are Sitka spruces and the wood is mostly in a good state
of preservation. How these trees were broken off without being
uprooted is dark to me at present. Perhaps most of their companions
were up rooted and carried away.
Ruins of Buried Forest,
East Side of Muir Glacier
|
July 7. Another fine day; scarce a cloud in the sky. The
icebergs in the bay are miraged in the distance to look like the
frontal wall of a great glacier. I am writing letters in anticipation
of the next steamer, the Queen.
She arrived about 2.30 P.M.
with two hundred and thirty tourists.
What a show they made with their ribbons and kodaks! All seemed
happy and enthusiastic, though it was curious to see how promptly
all of them ceased gazing when the dinner-bell rang, and
how many turned from the great thundering crystal world of ice
to look curiously at the Indians that came alongside to sell trinkets,
and how our little camp and kitchen arrangements excited so many
to loiter and waste their precious time prying into our poor hut.
July 8. A fine clear day. I went up the glacier to observe
stakes and found that a marked point near the middle of the current
had flowed about a hundred feet in eight days. On the medial moraine
one mile from the front there was no measureable displacement.
I found a raven devouring a tom-cod that was alive on a shallow
at the mouth of the creek. It had probably been wounded by a seal
or eagle.
July 10. I have been getting acquainted with the retain
features of the glacier and its fountain mountains with reference
to an exploration of its main tributaries and the upper part of
its prairie-like trunk, a trip I have long had in mind. I
have been building a sled and must now get fully ready to start
without reference to the weather. Yesterday evening I saw a large
blue berg just as it was detached sliding down from the front.
Two of Professor Reid's party rowed out to it as it sailed past
the camp, estimating it to be two hundred and forty feet in length
and one hundred feet high.
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