Friday, the 20th.—We struck camp at 7.15, and I started first with the men. Before going far I came on the discarded stove, and managed to hoist it along; but for this I received no thanks, as the others wasted a quarter of an hour in vainly searching for it. Dropping our loads at the point where the stream issued from the lake, Billy, Jimmy, and I went back for a fresh lot, and buried a letter for Shorty, directing them to follow us up stream. As E. had a cold, it was thought he had better not do any wading, and he remained in camp to pitch the tent and arrange things generally, while H. and W. went on to explore beyond our cache. After lunch the Indians went back for the last load, while I tried to get round the lake on the land side, but I found the rock so dangerous that I abandoned the attempt. I am no geologist, but it appeared to be a sort of clayey sandstone, very hard below, but with a soft crust on top, which gave way beneath hands, feet, or ice-axe. I then went round the lake on the ice side, and tried to cross what seemed to be a peninsula between the river and the head of the lake; but the ferns and alder-scrub on this proved to be so dense that after going some way without being able to see anything, I gave that up also, and returned to camp at half-past three. H. and W. came in at five o’clock, having got as far as a second lake, whence they were able to see the glacier that descends from St. Elias. Though this was still at some distance, we felt encouraged, and after supper indulged in a little whist. W. and E. played against H. and me; W.’s whist was indeed extraordinary, and he apparently so confused his partner as eventually to make him revoke in the most palpable manner by trumping clubs and then leading them. We never played whist again, but confined ourselves to piquet.
Saturday, the 21st.—A cloudless morning greeted us, and at 7.30 we four started out with the firm determination of reaching the long-sought glacier. We went up the river to the ice-arch, where we climbed again on to the glacier to turn the second lake. When we had gone a little further, we halted to sketch and photograph our mountain, the upper part of which was showing well over the Chaix Hills. We then plodded on over the disgusting moraine, and at noon reached the point where Libbey’s Glacier runs into the Agassiz. We halted here for lunch, and then started to climb it. Though descending at a considerable angle, it was not much broken, and in fifty minutes more E., W., and I, slanting across it in an easterly direction, reached a green island which so much resembled the Gletscher Alp at Saas Fee that we christened it the Langenfluh. On the other side of this there was a grand ice-fall with great black seracs. H. had stayed behind to take some bearings, and at first we failed to see him anywhere, but soon discovered that he was taking a more direct course up the glacier towards St. Elias. We pushed on, and soon joined him on the plateau above. Here, though a little later the ice would doubtless be bare, we found some snow-patches in the hollows, and had to be a little cautious about crevasses.
Fairly on the top at last, we halted before one of the most magnificent views I ever hope to see. The plateau stretched before us, at much the same level for eight or ten miles, right to the foot of the mountain, which here rose in one appalling precipice. Put the Dom as seen from Saas on the top of Monte Rosa as seen from Macugnaga, and you will have some idea of the grandeur of the spectacle that lay before us. To the right rose the double-headed Cook, seamed with a great couloir down its centre, then the rather shapeless mass of Vancouver, and beyond that numbers of unnamed peaks, some of which we thought we recognised as having been noticed at Yakutat. Far away to the east were Fairweather and Crillon, clearly defined on the horizon.
The upper part of our mountain was not so steep as the lower, but the whole face was streaming with avalanches, the dull boom of which was plainly audible from time to time, and on the mountain itself no possible route could be discovered. On the south arête rises a very prominent and beautiful peak (subsequently christened Haydon Peak), and beneath this were some rocks on which W. urged that an attempt might be made, but through the big telescope they looked most unpleasant, and he yielded to our united advice that we should return on our tracks, and, circumnavigating the Chaix Hills, which, from their broken nature, it was impossible to cross, see what we could do on the south-west side, where Seton-Karr had failed. After taking observations, which afterwards gave the height we had reached as 1,625 feet above the sea, we reluctantly left at about four o’clock, and tried to improve our return route by keeping down the bed of the stream, instead of on the ice, till nearly at the second lake; but I do not think we gained much, as we were then forced on to the glacier in its most unpleasant part. We stopped at the cache to bring back some stores, and finally reached camp at nine, very weary and footsore from the fearful moraine-walking, which had nearly destroyed one of my two pairs of boots already. Some tomato soup revived us somewhat, and we turned in at half past eleven.
Sunday, the 22nd.—The weather was again perfect, and we spent the morning in sketching and similar peaceful occupations, but H. was not going to allow us the luxury of a whole day’s rest, and after lunch we packed down again to Camp D, whence E. and I went on down stream, following the tracks made by our men on Thursday, which were plainly visible in the sandy soil. In forty minutes we reached Lake Castani, which presented an extraordinary scene; the water was very low, and enormous bergs lay stranded far up the hill, even to the very edge of the timber, some of them as much as a hundred feet above the level of the lake. We were here much puzzled by the sudden disappearance of the tracks at the water’s edge. The ice-cliffs were, as we had expected, utterly unscaleable, and we could only suppose that they had gone round, their footprints being invisible on the harder face of the hill.
We continued along the shore till we had crossed a small stream running in from the north, and kept on to the west for some distance, when we realised that the lake was in shape something between a broad arrow and a crescent moon, and that our best route in future would be to cut across from horn to horn. Accordingly, we turned inland through the trees, and in fifteen minutes reached a beautifully clear little rivulet, near which were many flat places well suited for a camp. Stepping out briskly, eighty minutes brought us back to camp at six o’clock, where we found the others preparing supper.
Monday, the 23rd.—We actually succeeded in getting off at 6.45, no light task, as it generally took a good two hours to make breakfast, including bread-baking, strike the tents, and arrange the packs. We coasted round the lake and dropped our loads, not on the stream where E. and I had been the day before, but by a small pond to the left, where we could see across Castani to the glaciers. The Indians then returned to D for more things, while H., E., and W. started with the hope of finding a way across the hills at our back. I had no belief in the possibility of this, and went on round the lake to try and find out, if possible, what had been the route of our other men. At the westernmost point of the peninsula projecting into the lake, I came on their traces for a few yards, when they again vanished at the water’s edge. Oddly enough, the true solution never once occurred to us. Going leisurely, I reached at 11.15 the north-west extremity of the lake, putting up half-a-dozen geese as I went whose wildness argued considerable knowledge of man. I then meditated a return to camp, but my plans were suddenly changed by coming on tracks in the herbage which I believed to be those of the men. I followed them, first over a space where the wind had overthrown all the trees in every direction, raising a natural abattis that presented most formidable obstacles, and then through some dense alder-scrub to the edge of the Guyot Glacier.
I supposed they must have gone back by this, and, as there was no objectionable river cutting me off, I thought I might as well go on to the glacier for a bit and ascertain its nature. A belt of moraine separated me from the white ice, and this moraine was different to that on the Agassiz. The glacier was much more even and the stones fewer, but in the hollows between the mounds lay pools of horrible red mud often knee-deep, which made the way anything but a primrose path, for the mud was often crusted enough to bear biggish stones, and so deluded the unwary traveller on to it. At length I got beyond this, making a slight sketch en route, and, going up parallel with the hills, found myself on white ice, but involved in a system of rather formidable crevasses, in one of which I nearly came to grief. It was at a point where two large crevasses ran together; I was between them, and as I reached the apex of the triangle, from which I intended to jump, the ice gave way beneath me, and I descended abruptly a distance of some seven or eight feet, but the block wedged beneath me, saving me from a violent squeeze, if not worse. Though somewhat jarred, I had not let go of my axe, and chipping a step or two, was soon out of my prison. A few minutes more brought me to level ice with very few stones on it, and as I was able to walk very fast on this, I had at two o’clock nearly reached the west end of the Chaix Hills, which here had subsided into green knolls, though a mile or so further back a large lake, which with its ramifications and the gorges from them evidently extended far inland, must have hopelessly cut off the others had they tried to cross the hills direct.
I was congratulating myself on my superior astuteness, when, to my utter amazement, I heard shots, and discovered the others pursuing ptarmigan on the hills with their revolvers. By the time I reached them they had exhausted their few cartridges, and I found W. anxiously watching over the old hen, who obligingly waited till I arrived, but unfortunately I also missed, and we had no ptarmigan for supper that night. The others had failed almost at once in their attempt to cross the hills and so had descended to the glacier, and it was their track I had followed through the bush. E. was very full of a small trout which they had discovered in one of the pools of a tiny rill on the hills, and it was certainly a complete marvel what that fish could do with himself in winter, when one would think everything would be frozen solid. E. went back next day, captured him and bottled him in alcohol.
On the hills we all scattered; I went across to the other side and had a grand view of St. Elias across the curve of the Tyndall Glacier, but coming back to the Guyot a good deal lower down than where I had left it, I found I had missed the others. Being rather tired, I was disinclined to go back, so kept on homewards, and an hour’s moraine, and then fifty minutes across the neck of the peninsula, on which were one or two pools full of yellow water-lilies, brought me into camp at six o’clock pretty well beat, but I got two loaves made and some apples cooked by the time they arrived an hour later. We then had to pitch our tent, and it was, as usual, hard to find a flat place, but we managed it at last, though the flies and mosquitoes here threatened to be worse than ever.