MT. WRANGEL: 20,000 FEET
In the Forks of Copper River: it is the loftiest Mountain on the North American Continent
The Suchnito or Copper River has long been a bugbear, for the Russians[38] years ago have returned from several unsuccessful attempts to ascend it, and gave the excuse of being driven out of the valley by savage and warlike natives. Recently it has been thoroughly explored, and the “savages” are found to be less than two hundred inoffensive natives, who constitute the whole population of this mysterious Atna or Maidnevskie region. But navigating the river is terrific labor, inasmuch as it is a continuous, swift rapid throughout its entire course.
This river is a short, turbulent, brawling stream, less than two hundred and fifty miles in length, but rising in the heart of a lofty and mighty mass of volcanic mountains. It receives a score of imposing glaciers, which almost rival those of Icy Bay in Cross Sound. The silt that these gelid rivers pour into its channel has given it a deltoid mouth of extended and most intricate area.
Triangulations made by an officer of the Army last year declare that Mount Wrangel is the loftiest peak on the North American continent. The feet of this magnificent volcanic dome are washed by the forks of Copper River, which is eighteen thousand six hundred and forty feet below the apex of its smoking cap. Then the river at this point is more than two thousand feet above sea-level, so the vast altitude of more than twenty thousand feet for Mount Wrangel seems to be truthfully claimed.
The soil which borders the abrupt banks of the Copper River is entirely composed of glacial silt and gravel. It is moist and boggy in the driest seasons, covered with rank growing grasses and dense thickets of poplars, birches, and willows, that line the margins of the stream. The higher lands, as they rise from the narrow valley, are in turn clothed with a dense growth of spruce-forest, which gradually fades out into russet-colored areas of rock-sphagnum as the altitude increases to that point where nothing but the cold and frost-defying lichen can cling alive to the weather-splintered summits of alpine heights above.
Fish (salmon) are the chief reliance of these natives of Copper River; they depend almost wholly upon the annual running of those creatures. The difficulty of hunting is so great that the savage is content with shooting a few mountain sheep, a wandering moose or two, and, perhaps, a stray bear in the course of the year. Also, huckleberries and salmon berries are abundant on the sunshiny slopes of the high glacial river-terraces during August and September.
West of the Copper River mighty masses of the Choogatch Mountains rise directly from the sea without any intervening lowland, save at three tiny points upon which savage man has hastened to fix his abode. Many crests to this range on the north side of Prince William’s Sound must have a mean elevation of over ten thousand feet, densely wooded with semper-virent coniferous forests up to a height of one thousand feet above sea-level, and covered with everlasting snowy blankets to within three or four thousand feet of the ocean at their bases. The body of Prince William’s Sound is so forbidding in its dark grandeur that even the stolid Russians never tired of narrating its stirring impression upon their senses. Although the interior of this gulf is completely land-locked, being sheltered from the south by the islands of Noochek and Montague, yet it is by no means a safe or pleasant sheet of water to navigate, inasmuch as furious gales and “woollies” sweep down upon it from the steep mountain sides and cañons, so that, without even a moment’s warning, the traveller’s craft is suddenly stricken, and compelled to instantly run for shelter under the lee of some one of the hundreds of islands and capes which stud its waters or point its coast. Immense glaciers are descending from the cavernous inlets of the northern and eastern shores, and shedded fragments of ice, large and small, are cemented by the tide into large sheets, which are finally swept out and lost in the ocean.
VALDES GLACIER