CHAPTER X.MUIR GLACIER AND IDAHO INLET.

When Dick Willoughby told of the great glacier thirty miles up the bay, the thud of whose falling ice could be heard and felt at his house, and declared that it once rattled the tea-cups on his table, and sent a wave washing high up on his shore, the captain of theIdahosaid he would go there, and took this Dick Willoughby along to find the place and prove the tale. Away we went coursing up Glacier Bay, a fleet of one hundred and twelve little icebergs gayly sailing out to meet us, as we left our anchorage the next morning. Entering into these unknown and unsurveyed waters, the lead was cast through miles of bottomless channels, and when the ship neared a green and mountainous island at the mouth of the bay, the captain and the pilot made me an unconditional present of the domain, and duly entered it on the ship’s log by name. It is just off Garden Point, and for a summer resort Scidmore Island possesses unusual advantages. Heated and suffering humanity is invited to visit that emerald spot in latitude 58° 29´ north, and longitude 135° 52´ west from Greenwich, and enjoy the July temperature of 45°, the seal and salmon fishing, the fine hunting, and the sight of one of the grandest of themany great glaciers that break directly into the sea along the Alaska coast.

The gray-green water, filled with sediment, told that glaciers were near, and icebergs, from the size of a house down to the merest lumps, circled around us, showing the ineffable shades of pale greens and blues, and clinking together musically as the steamer passed by. The tides rush fiercely in and out of Glacier Bay, and heavy fogs add to the dangers of navigation, and Captain Beardslee and Major Morris, who entered it in the little steamer Favorite in 1880, were obliged to put back without making any explorations. The charts as they now appear are very faulty, the sketches having been made from information given by Mr. Willoughby and Indian seal hunters, and from brief notes furnished by Professor Muir. At the head of every inlet around the great bay there are glaciers, and Mr. Willoughby said that in five of these fiords there are glaciers a mile and a half wide, with vertical fronts of seamed ice rising two hundred and four hundred feet from the water. In one of them a small island divides the ice cataract, and Niagara itself is repeated in this glacial corner of the north. At low tide, bergs and great sections of the fronts fall off into the water, and Glacier Bay is filled with this debris of the glaciers, that floats out from every inlet and is swept to and fro with the tides.

Dick Willoughby stood on the bridge with the navigators, and gave them the benefit of his experience. After a while he came back to the group of ladies on deck, and, sitting down, shook his head seriously and said:—

“You ladies are very brave to venture up in sucha place. If you only knew the risks you are running—the dangers you are in!” And the pioneer’s voice had a tone of the deepest concern as he said it.

We received this with some laughter, and expressed entire confidence in the captain and pilot, who had penetrated glacial fastnesses and unknown waters before. A naval officer on board echoed the Willoughby strain, and declared that a commander would never attempt to take a man-of-war into such a dangerous place, and deprecated Captain Carroll’s daring and rashness. The merchant marine was able to retaliate when this naval comment was repeated, and Glacier Bay was suggested as the safest place for a government vessel’s cruise, on account of the entire absence of schooners.

DIAGRAM OF THE MUIR GLACIER.

The lead was cast constantly, and theIdahoveered gracefully from right to left, went slowly, and stopped at times, to avoid the ice floes that bore down upon it with the outgoing tide. Feeling the way along carefully, the anchor was cast beside a grounded iceberg, and the photographers were rowed off to a small island to take the view of the ship in the midst of that Arctic scenery. Mount Crillon showed his hoary head to us in glimpses between the clouds,and then, rounding Willoughby Island, which the owner declares is solid marble of a quality to rival that of Pentelicus and Carrara, we saw the full front of the great Muir Glacier, where it dips down and breaks into the sea, at the end of an inlet five miles long.

The inlet and the glacier were named for Professor John Muir, the Pacific coast geologist, who, as far as known, was the first white man to visit and explore the glaciers of the bay. Professor Muir went up Glacier Bay, with the Rev. S. Hall Young, of Fort Wrangell, as a companion, in 1879. They travelled by canoe, and Professor Muir, strapping a blanket on his back, and filling his pockets with hard tack, started off unarmed, and spent days of glacial delight in the region. These were the only white men who had preceded us, when Captain Carroll took theIdahoup the bay in 1883, on what was quite as good as a real voyage of exploration.

Of all scenes and natural objects, nothing could be grander and more impressive than the first view up the inlet, with the front of the great glacier, the slope of the glacial field, and the background of lofty mountains united in one picture. Mount Crillon and Mount Fairweather stood as sentries across the bay, showing their summits fifteen thousand feet in air, clear cut as silhouettes against the sky, and the stillness of the air was broken only by faint, metallic, tinkling sounds, as the ice floes ground together, and the waters washed up under the honeycombed edges of the floating bergs. Steaming slowly up the inlet, the bold, cliff-like front of the glacier grew in height as we approached it, and there was a sense of awe asthe ship drew near enough for us to hear the strange, continual rumbling of the subterranean or subglacial waters, and see the avalanches of ice that, breaking from the front, rushed down into the sea with tremendous crashes and roars. Estimates of the height of the ice cliff increased with nearness, and from a first guess of fifty feet, there succeeded those of two hundred and four hundred feet, which the authority of angles has since proven as correct.

TheIdahowas but an eighth of a mile from the front of the glacier, when the anchor was cast in eighty-four fathoms of water at low tide, and near us, in the midst of these deep soundings, icebergs loaded with boulders lay grounded, with forty feet of their summits above water. Words and dry figures can give one little idea of the grandeur of this glacial torrent flowing steadily and solidly into the sea, and the beauty of the fantastic ice front, shimmering with all the prismatic hues, is beyond imagery or description.

According to Professor Muir, the glacier measures three miles across the snout, or front, where it breaks off into the sea. Ten miles back it is ten miles wide, and sixteen tributary glaciers unite to form this one great ice-river. Professor Muir ascended to the glacier field from the north side, and, following its edges for six miles, climbed the high mountain around which the first tributary debouches from that side. He gives the distance from the snout of the glacier to its furthest source in the great nève, or snow-fields, as forty miles. Detailed accounts of Professor Muir’s canoe journeys in glacier land were given in his letters to the San FranciscoBulletin, and theyabound in the most beautiful and poetic descriptions of the scenery. His paper on “The Glaciation of the Arctic and Sub-Arctic Regions, visited by the U. S. S.Corwinin the year 1881,” accompanies the report of Captain C. L. Hooper, U. S. R. M., published by the government printing office at Washington in 1885, and contains Professor Muir’s observations and deductions upon the glaciation of the whole Pacific coast from California to the Arctic.

No attempt has yet been made to measure the rate of progress of the Muir glacier, although Captain Carroll has several times promised himself to stake off and mark points on the main trunk, and note their positions from month to month during the summer. Mr. Willoughby said that the Indians told him that two years previously the line of the ice wall was a half mile further down the inlet, and that in their grandfathers’ time it extended as far as Willoughby Island, five miles below. The old moraine that forms the bar at the mouth of the bay is sufficient evidence to scientists that the ice sheet covered the whole bay within what Professor Muir calls “a very short geological time ago.” The Hooniah goat-hunters told Mr. Willoughby that the first tributary glacier connected with the Davidson glacier in Lynn Canal, and that they often made the journey across it to the Chilkat country. Kloh-Kutz told Professor Davidson that it was a one day’s journey on snowshoes—about thirty miles—over to this bay of great glaciers, and thirty days’ journey thence, through a region of high mountains and snow fields, to the ocean at the foot of the Mount St. Elias Alps.

RIVER ON NORTH SIDE OF THE MUIR GLACIER.

The vast, desolate stretch of gray ice visible across the top of the serrated wall of ice that faced us had a strange fascination, and the crack of the rending ice, the crash of the falling fragments, and a steady undertone like the boom of the great Yosemite Fall, added to the inspiration and excitement. There was something, too, in the consciousness that so few had ever gazed upon the scene before us, and there were neither guides nor guide books to tell us which way to go, and what emotions to feel.

We left the stewards cutting ice from the grounded bergs near the ship, and, putting off in the lifeboats, landed in the ravine on the north side of the glacier. We scrambled over two miles of sand and boulders, along the steep, crumbling banks of a roaring river, until we reached the arch under the side of the glacier from which the muddy torrent poured. Near that point, on the loose moraine at the side, there was the remnant of a buried forest, with the stumps of old cedar-trees standing upright in groups. They were stripped of their bark, and cut off six and ten feet above the surface, and pieces of wood were scattered all through the debris of this moraine. The disforesting of the shores of Glacier Bay is the mystery that baffles Professor Muir, as on all this densely wooded coast, this one bay lacks the thick carpet of moss and the forests that elsewhere conceal the evidences of glacial action. Patches of crimson epilobium covered the ground in spots, and flourished among the boulders at the edge of the ice sheet, where only a thin layer of dirt covers buried ice.

Reaching the sloping side of the ice-field, we mounted, and went down a mile over the seamedand ragged surface towards the broken ice of the water front. The ice was a dirty gray underfoot, but it crackled with a pleasant mid-winter sound, and the wind blew keen and sharp from over the untrodden miles of the glacier field. The gurgle and hollow roar of the subterranean waters came from deep rifts in the broken surface, and in the centre and towards the front of the glacier, the ice was tossed and broken like the waves of an angry sea. The amateur photographers turned their cameras to right and left, risked their necks in the deep ravines and hollows in the ice, and climbed the surrounding points to get satisfactory views. Every one gathered a pocketful of rounded rocks and pebbles, and shreds of ancient cedar trees carried down by the ice flood, and then, having worn rubber shoes and boots to tatters on the sharp ice, and sunk many times in the treacherous glacier mud, we reluctantly obeyed the steamer’s whistle and cannon-shot, and started back to the boats.

A nearer sweep towards the long ice-cliff showed that the line of the front was broken into bays and points, the middle of the glacier jutting far out into the water, and the sides sweeping back in curves, as the cliffs decreased in height, and finally sloped down to the level of the side moraines. At points along the front, subterranean rivers boiled up, and, in the deep blue crevasses, cascades ran down over icy beds. In the full sunlight the front of the glacier was a dazzling wall of silver and snowy ice, gleaming with all the rainbow colors, and disclosing fresh beauties as each new crevasse or hollow came in sight.

GLACIER BAY. FRONT OF MUIR GLACIER.

A magnificent sunset flooded the sky that night,and filled every icy ravine with rose and orange lights. At the last view of the glacier, as we steamed away from it, the whole brow was glorified and transfigured with the fires of sunset; the blue and silvery pinnacles, the white and shining front floating dreamlike on a roseate and amber sea, and the range and circle of dull violet mountains lifting their glowing summits into a sky flecked with crimson and gold.

It was a chill, misty morning, a year later, when the watch again sighted “Scidmore Island, one mile off the starboard beam,” and its long, green undulating shore was visible through the rain. Entering Muir Inlet, theAnconwent cautiously through the floating ice and anchored in the curve of the south end of the glacier’s front, but a few hundred yards from a long shelving beach that would have shone with its golden sand in sunlight. There were the same deep soundings near the front, as on the other side of the inlet, but theAncon’sanchor was dropped nearer the moraine shore, where the lead gave only twenty-five fathoms.

Under the dull gray sky all dazzling effects of prismatic light were lost, but the fretted and fantastic front showed lines and masses of the purest white and an infinite range of blues. Avalanches of crumbling ice and great pieces of the front were continually falling with the roar and crash of artillery, revealing new caverns and rifts of deeper blue light, while the spray dashed high and the great waves rolled along the icy wall, and, widening in their sweep, washed the blocks of floating ice up on the beaches at either side. The ship’s cannon was loaded andfired twice point blank at the front of the glacier. The report was followed by a second of silence, and then an echo came back that intensified the first ring many times, and was followed by a long, sharp roll as the echo was flung from cavern to cavern in the ice.

SECTION OF THE MUIR GLACIER (TOP.)

The small boats landed us on a beach strewn with ice cakes, and lines of stranded shrimps marked the wash of the waves raised by the falling ice. Some shrimps two and three inches long were found, but the most of them were delicate little pink things not an inch in length. The crimson epilobium blossoms nodded to us from every slope and hollow of the long lateral moraine that lay between the water and the high mountain walls. Over sand and boulders, and across a roaring stream that issued from the side of the glacier, the pilgrims crept to the foot of the slope,and then up a long incline of boulders and dirty ice to a first level where they could look out over the frozen waste and across the broken front. Deep crevasses seamed the ice plain in every direction, as on the north side of the frozen river; but, although the view is not so extended as on the other side, the level of the ice field is reached more easily, and it is a steep but only a short climb up over the buried ice to the top of the glacier. The treacherous gray glacier mud—“the mineral paste, and mountain meal“ of Prof. Muir—engulfed one at every careless step, and rocks would sink under one, and land even the high-booted pilgrims knee-deep in the fine, sticky compound. A half-mile from what appeared to be the bank of the frozen river, there was clear solid ice underlying the rocks and mud, and occasionally caves in this side wall enticed the breathless ones to rest themselves in the pale shadows of the glacier ice. Fragments and rounded pebbles of red and gray granite, limestone, marble, schistose slate, porphyry and quartz were picked up on the way, and many of the bits of quartz and marble were deeply stained with iron. The Polish mining engineer with the party assured us that all Glacier Bay was rich in the indications of a great silver-belt, and held up carbonates, sulphates, and sulphurets to prove his assertion.

From this south-side landing we easily approached the base of the ice cliffs by following up the beach to the ravine that cut into the ice at the edge of the moraine. We got a far better idea of the height and solidity of the walls by standing like pigmies in the shadow of the lofty front, and looking up to thegrottoes and clefts in the cobalt and indigo cliff. It was dry and firm on the beach, and the golden sand was strewn with dripping bergs of sapphire and aquamarine that had been swept ashore by the spreading waves. These huge blocks of ice on the beach, that had looked like dice from the ship, were found to be thirty and forty feet long and twenty feet high.

The nearer one approached, the higher the ice walls seemed, and all along the front there were pinnacles and spires weighing several tons, that seemed on the point of toppling every moment. The great buttresses of ice that rose first from the water and touched the moraine were as solidly white as marble, veined and streaked with rocks and mud, but further on, as the pressure was greater, the color slowly deepened to turquoise and sapphire blues. The crashes of falling ice were magnificent at that point, and in the face of a keen wind that blew over the ice-field we sat on the rocks and watched the wondrous scene. The gloomy sky seemed to heighten the grandeur, and the billows of gray mist, pouring over the mountains on either side, intensified the sense of awe and mystery. The tide was running out all of the afternoon hours that we spent there, and the avalanches of ice were larger and more frequent all of the time. When the anchor was lifted, the ship took a great sweep up nearer to the glacier’s front, and as we steamed away there were two grand crashes, and great sections of the front fell off with deafening roars into the water. We steamed slowly down the inlet, and out into Glacier Bay, stopping, backing, and going at half speed to avoid the floatingice all around us, that occasionally was ground and crunched up by the paddle-wheels with a most uncomfortable sound. With each thump from the ice, and the recurrence of the noise in the paddle-box, and then the sight of some red slats floating off on the water, Dick Willoughby’s concern was remembered; and the advantages of the screw propeller, and the merits of the favorite and originalIdaho, were appreciated.

SECTION OF THE MUIR GLACIER (FRONT.)

While we cruised away in the mist and twilight, the children, who never could be made to keep ordinary bedtime in that latitude, celebrated the birthday of one of their number with high revel. While they danced around the cake on the cabin table, and blew out the eight candles one by one with an accompanying wish, the last boy wished that the happy youngster might “celebrate many more birthdays in Glacier Bay,” and the elders applauded him.

After theIdahohad made its first visit to the Muir Glacier, and returned Dick Willoughby to his Hooniah home and his strawberry farm, we had a seven hours’ enforced anchorage, on the succeeding day, in a narrow fiord on the north end of Chicagoff Island, which that same Willoughby had described as an unknown channel, “a hole in the mountain,” and a short cut to the open ocean, that he had travelled many times himself. Following up his forty-fathom channel, the lead marked shoaling waters, and before we knew it theIdahoran her nose on a sloping bank, and stayed there until the returning tide floated her off.

There had not been a canoe in sight, nor a sign of life along the shores all that morning, but the ship’sofficers had hardly settled the fact that they were hard aground before several canoes were seen in the wake, and the gangway was surrounded with bargaining Hooniahs, who held up furs, baskets, and trophies for us to buy. More and more of them came paddling down the narrow lane of emerald water, and family groups in red blankets were soon at home around blazing camp fires on the narrow ledges of the shore, and added greatly to the picturesqueness of the scene. Of all the little fiords we had been into, this one was the most beautiful, and even Naha Bay cannot surpass it. The narrow channel has steep, wooded hills on either side, and a rugged, snow-covered mountain stands sentry at the head of the fiord, and the clear, green water was so still that every tree and twig was clearly reflected; the ship rested double, and the breasts of the soaring eagles were mirrored in all the shadings of their plumage. The silence was profound, and every voice or sound on deck was echoed from the mountains, and could be heard for a long distance up the inlet. Had it not been for the Hooniah canoes following so promptly, we might have supposed ourselves explorers, who had penetrated into some enchanted region, or dreamers who were seeing this beautiful valley in a strange sleep. It was exploration to the extent that all our course up the inlet was across the dry land of all the charts then published, and theIdahowas aground in the woods according to the authorized maps.

This Idaho Inlet, as it is now put down, is the sportsman’s long-sought paradise. The stewards, who went ashore with the tank-boats for fresh water,startled seven deer as they pushed their way to the foot of a cascade, and the young men who went off in an Indian canoe caught thirteen large salmon with their inexperienced spearing. Mr. Wallace, the first officer, took a party off in the ship’s small boats, and we swept gayly up the inlet, over waters where the salmon and flounders could be seen darting in schools through the water and just escaping the strokes of the oar. At the mouth of the creek at the head of the inlet, the freshening current was alive with fish, and some of the energetic ones landed there, and, pushing ahead for exploration, were soon lost to sight in the high grass and the underbrush that fringed the forest. It began to rain about that time, and a dripping group remained by the boats, watching the rainbow fish playing in the waters, and enjoying the dry Scotch humor of the officer, who had led us off on this water picnic. Clouds rolled over our snow-capped mountain and blurred the landscape, and after an hour of quietly sitting in the rain, even the amphibious Scot began to wish, too, that the wanderers would return, lest the falling tide should leave us on the wrong side of the shallows at the mouth of the creek. As he took a less humorous view of the situation, all the rest joined in the strain and began to berate the Alaska climate with its constant downpour. Some one was impelled to ask the genial Scotchman if it was really true that the summit of Ben Nevis is never seen oftener than twice a year. He nearly upset the boat to refute that slander, and his emphatic “No!” may be still ringing and echoing around the north end of Chicagoff Island.

After the first officer had returned his boatloads ofdamp but enthusiastic passengers to the ship, the stories of fish, and boasts of the great bear-tracks seen on shore, disturbed the tranquillity of the anchorage. The captain of the ship took his rifle and was rowed away to shallow waters, where he shot a salmon, waded in, and threw it ashore. While wandering along after the huge bear-tracks, that were twelve inches long by affidavit measure, he saw an eagle flying off with his salmon, and another fine shot laid the bird of freedom low. When the captain returned to the ship he threw the eagle and the salmon on deck, and at the size of the former every one marvelled. The outspread wings measured the traditional six feet from tip to tip, and the beak, the claws, and the stiff feathers were rapidly seized upon as trophies and souvenirs of the day. A broad, double rainbow arched over us as we left the lovely niche between the mountains in the evening, and then we swept back to Icy Straits and started out to the open ocean, and down the coast to Sitka, having a glimpse, on the way, of the vast glacier at the head of Taylor Bay, that Vancouver and his men visited while his ships lay at anchor in Port Althorp, just west of our Idaho Inlet.

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