CAVE IN THE GREAT GLACIER, BRITISH AMERICA.
Glancing for a moment at the results of a general exploration, we find that there are between sixty and seventy small residual glaciers in the California Sierras. Through Oregon and Washington, glaciers, some of them of considerable size, still exist on the highest volcanic cones of the Cascade Mountains—the Three Sisters, Mounts Jefferson, Hood, St. Helens, Adams, Tacoma, Baker, and others, though none of them approach the sea. Through British Columbia and Southeastern Alaska the broad, sustained chain of mountains extending along the coast is generally glacier-bearing. The upper branches of nearly every cañon are occupied by glaciers, which gradually increase in size to the northward until the lofty region between Glacier Bay and Mount St. Elias is reached.
The largest of the glaciers that discharge into Glacier Bay is the Muir, and being also the most accessible is the one to which tourists are taken and allowed to go ashore and climb about its ice-cliffs and watch the huge blue bergs as with tremendous thundering roar and surge they emerge and plunge from the majestic vertical ice-wall in which the glacier terminates.
The front of the glacier is about three miles wide, but the central berg-producing portion, that stretches across from side to side of the inlet, like a huge jagged barrier, is only about half as wide. The height of the ice-wall above the water is from 250 to 300 feet, but soundings made by Captain Carroll show that about 720 feet of the wall is below the surface, while still a third portion is buried beneath moraine material. Therefore, were the water and rocky detritus cleared away, a sheer wall of blue ice would be presented a mile and a half wide and more than a thousand feet high.
SCUZZIE FALLS, NEAR NORTH BEND, BRITISH AMERICA.
The number of bergs that become detached from the glacier every twelve hours varies with tide and weather, but generally a new one is thus fresh born every six or seven minutes, and so massive that the discharge may be heard like thunder or cannonading two or more miles away. When one of the fissured masses falls there is first a heavy, plunging crash, then a deep, deliberate, long-drawn-out thundering roar, followed by clashing, grating sounds from the agitated bergs set in motion by the new arrival, and the swash of waves along the beach. All the very large bergs rise from the bottom with a still grander commotion, rearing aloft in the air nearly to the top of the wall, with tons of water pouring down their sides, heaving and plunging again and again ere they settle and sail away as blue crystal islands; free at last after being held rigid as part of the slow-crawling glacier for centuries. And strange it seems that ice formed from snow on the mountains two and three hundred years ago, should after all its toil and travel in grinding down and fashioning the face of the landscape still remain so lovely in color and so pure.
The rate of motion of the glacier as has been determined by Professor Reid is, near the front, about from five to ten feet per day. This one glacier is made up of about 200 tributary glaciers, which drain an area of about a thousand square miles, and contains more ice than all the eleven hundred glaciers of the Alps combined. The distance from the front back to the head of the farthest tributary is about fifty miles, and the width of the trunk below the confluence of the main tributaries is twenty miles or more.