Our Arctic province

by Henry Wood Elliott

The great growth of trees everywhere here, and the practical impenetrability of these forests on foot, owing to brush and bushes, all green and growing in tangled jungle, is caused by the comparative immunity of this country from the scourge of forest fires: this is due to a phenomenal dampness of the climate—it rains, rains, and drizzles here two-thirds of the time. The heaviest rains are local, usually occurring on the western or ocean slopes of the islands where the sea-winds, surcharged with moisture, first meet a barrier to their flow and are thrown up into the cooler regions of the atmosphere. It will be often noticed, from the steamer, that while heavy rain is falling on the lofty hills and mountains of Prince of Wales Island, it is clear and bright directly over the Strait of Clarence to the eastward, and not far distant. June and July are the most agreeable seasons of the year in which to visit the Sitkan district, as a rule.

Many thoughtful observers have questioned the truth of the exuberant growth of forestry peculiar to this region, as being due to that incessant rainfall mentioned above; no doubt, it is not wholly so; but yet, if the ravages of fire ran through the islets of the archipelago, as it does in the interior slightly to the eastward, the same order of vegetation here would be soon noted as we note it there to-day; everywhere that you ascend the inlets of the mainland, the shores become steep and rocky, with no beach, or very little; the trees become scrubby in appearance, and are mingled with much dead wood (brulé). Scarcely any soil clothes the slopes, and extensive patches of bare rock crop out frequently everywhere.

Although the forest is omnipresent up to snow-line in this great land-locked Sitkan district, yet it differs much in rankness of growth and consequent value; it nowhere clothes the ridges or the summits, which are 1,500 to 2,000 feet above tide-level; these peaks and rocky elevations are usually bare, and show a characteristically green-gray tint due to the sphagnous mosses and dwarfed brier and bushes peculiar to this altitude, making an agreeable and sharp contrast to that sombre and monotonous line of the conifers below. The variety is limited, being substantially confined to three evergreens, the spruce (Abies sitkensis and menziesii), the hemlock (Abies mertensiana), and the cedar (Thuja gigantea). The last is the most valuable, is found usually growing near the shores, and never in great quantities at any one place; wherever a sheltered flat place is found, there these trees seem to grow in the greatest luxuriance. In the narrower passages, where no seas can enter, the forest seems almost to root in the beach, and its branches hang pendent to the tides, and dip therein at high water. Where a narrow beach, capped with warm sands and soil, occurs in sheltered nooks, vividly green grass spreads down until it reaches the yellow sea-weed “tangle” that grows everywhere in such places reached by high tide, for, owing to the dampness of the climate, a few days exposure at neap-tides fails to injure this fucoid growth. Ferns, oh! how beautiful they are!—also grow most luxuriantly and even abundantly upon the fallen, rotting tree-trunks, and even into the living arboreal boughs, and green mosses form great club-like masses on the branches.

Large trunks of this timber, overthrown and dead, become here at once perfect gardens of young trees, moss, and bushes, even though lying high above the ground and supported on piles of yet earlier windfall. Similar features characterize the littoral forests of the entire land-locked region of the northwest coast, from Puget Sound to the mouth of Lynn Canal.

In addition to these overwhelmingly dominant conifers already specified, a few cottonwoods and swamp-maples and alders are scattered in the jungle which borders the many little streams and the large rivers like the Stickeen, Tahko, and Chilkat. Crab-apples (Pyrus rivularis) form small groves on Prince of Wales Island, where the beach is low and capped with good soil. Then on the exposed, almost bare rocks of the western hilltops of the islands of the archipelago, a scrub pine (Pinus contorta) is found; it also grows in small clumps here and there just below the snow-line on the mountains generally. Berries abound; the most important being the sal-lal (Gaultheria shallow)—they are eaten fresh in great quantities, and are also dried for use in winter—and another small raspberry (Rubus sp.), a currant (Ribes sp.), and a large juicy whortleberry. Of course these berries do not have the flavor or body which we prize at home in our small fruits of similar character—but up here they, in the absence of anything better or as good, are eaten with avidity and relish, even by the white travellers who happen to be around when the fruit is ripe; wild strawberries appear in sheltered nooks; a wild gooseberry too is found, but it, like the crab-apple of Prince of Wales Island, is not a favorite—it is drastic.

KOOTZNAHOO INLET

Characteristic view of scenery in the Sitkan Archipelago. The high lands and peaks of Admiralty Island in the distance; Indians fishing for halibut over rocky shoals in the foreground. An October sketch, looking East from Chatham Straits

We find in many places throughout this district highland moors, which constitute the level plateau-summits of ridges and mountain foothills; these areas are always sparsely timbered, covered by a thick carpet of sphagnous heather, and literally brilliant in June and July with the spangled radiance of an extensive variety of flowering annuals and biennials. In these moorland mantles, which are usually soaked full of moisture so as to be fairly spongy under foot, cranberries flourish, of excellent flavor, and quite abundant, though, compared with our choice Jersey and Cape Cod samples, they are very small.

Certainly the scenery of this Venetian wilderness of Lower Alaska is wonderful and unrivalled—the sounds, the gulfs, bays, fiörds, and river-estuaries are magnificent sheets of water, and the snow-capped peaks, which spring abruptly from their mirrored depths, give the scene an ever-changing aspect. At places the ship seems to really be at sea, then she enters a canal whose lofty walls of syenite, slate, and granite shut out the light of day, and against which her rigging scrapes, and the passenger’s hand may almost touch—a hundred thousand sparkling streams fall in feathery cascades, adown their mural heights, and impetuous streams beat themselves into white foam as they leap either into the eternal depths of the Pacific or its deep arms.