The Iola register. [volume] (Iola, Allen County, Kansas) 1875-1902, 1885-05-08
THE GLACIERS OF ALASKA.
Forty Mics Across the Mountains by til,
Ice.

Ice.
When the Davidson glacier takes its
last turn in its course and pushes out
through a grand gateway in the
mountains, it spreads out in fan shape
and sweeps down in long graceful
slope to its terminal moraine. The
moraine has been built up from the
water by the deposit of rocks, peb-
bles and sand, ground up and car
red down from the mountains by the
glacier, until a long strip of dry land
formed in front of the melting ice.
The moraine before the Davidson gla-
cier was made 50 long ago that
dense forest of ancient and lofty pines
has stretched like hedge across the
three miles of the glacier front.
Forty miles across the mountains by
the ice. or around four or five times
that distance by water to the other
side of the mountainous peninsula is
the famous Glacier Bay. the great
natural show place of Alaska. Seven
immense glaciers flow into the waters
of the bay. coming down twenty, forty
and even sixty miles from great snow
fields in the White Mountain and Fair
weather Alps Range. One of the larg-
est of these ice rivers is named the
Muir Glacier. in honor of Professor
John Muir, of California, who was the
first white man to tell the world of its
existence no further back than 1879.
He went cautiously up an inlet of the
how N hrt ar
ocean steamers ride up within
each summer, and are received with
thunders and cannonades from. the ice
spirits at every visit.
Sailing up that long inlet filled with
bergs and floating ice. one sees broad
gray river of ice pouring down a great
valley between two mountain ranges,
with tributary streams of ice 10 ming it
from every gap and deiile. and from
around every iutting point.
The frozen flood, with its tossed and
broken waves. stretches ten miles across
from mountain wall to mountain wall;
and the long tongue of ice running
down to the inlet presents water
washed, crystalline cliff three miles
long, and from two to four hundred
feet in height. Slowly creeping down
the valley. and thrusting itself into the
water, the ice is honey combed by the
washing of tides and huge pieces of
the front. and avalancheS of fee are
sliding down into the water with con-
tinuous crash and roar at low tide.
The spray and waves dash far up the
glittering front after one of these great
ice slides, and there is magnificent
play of prismat;c colors on the fretted
and fantastic ice wall when the sun
light falls full on the western front.
The largest glaciers of Switzerland
could be put away in corner of the
Muir Glacier and lost; and except on
the coast of Greenland it is
claimed that there is nothing
that surpasses this and other
water fronting glaciers of Southern
Alaska. A great river boils up from
under the middle of the glacier where
a long cape or point of ice runs out
into the water. and on either side of the
glacier streams emerge from the sides
of the ice and course over the long
sides or lateral moraines to the inlet.
The river 'on the north side is the
larger, and by long climb over stones
and powders and along crumbling
banks the dark grotto in the glacier is
reached from which the muddy river
rnshes to the sunlight after its long
course in the heart OF the glacier.