Wherever these glaciers reach the sea, or connect with it by draining rivers,—and all large glaciers, at least, do this,—there is seen a milky sediment floating in the water, which these “mills of the gods” grind from the mountain flanks in their slow but rasping course down their sides. Wherever they find calcareous strata to abrade, the water is almost milklike in hue for miles around. The glacier of the Grand Plateau is the last one facing the Pacific itself, as we move northward; but, where little bays cut back through the flat lands at the foot of the range, they may reach the glaciers which exist everywhere on the mountain sides.
Off the Bay of Yakutat,—a name given it by the resident T'linkit tribes,—we have our best view of imperial St. Elias, the crowning peak of this noble range, and the highest mountain in all North America,—nearly 20,000 feet above the sea-level, and all of this vast height seemingly springing from the very sea itself. No good picture has ever been given of it, and no words have ever fully described it. All of the superlatives of our language have clothed so many lesser peaks that they fall flat and mentally tasteless in the presence of this Alpine Titan, rearing his crest among the clouds as if defying description. This want of words has been felt by so many who have visited the grand scenery of Alaska, who saw that, in illustrating a fjord here or a glacier there, they have but duplicated the word-painting of some other writer describing a puny antagonist, compared with their subject, that I will give it in the words of one who expresses the idea more closely than I. It is from the pen of a correspondent in the Kansas City Journal, under date of September 14, 1885.
“The difficult thing for the tourist to do in regard to Alaska is to describe what is seen for the general reader. Everything is on such an immense and massive scale that words are diminutives for expression, rather than—as travelers have been credited with using them—for exaggerated descriptions. For example, people cross the continent to sail for an hour or two among the Thousand Islands of the St. Lawrence, and word-painting has been exhausted in exaltation of their beauties. But here is a thousand miles of islands, ranging in size from an acre to the proportions of a State, covered with evergreen forests of tropical luxuriance, yet so arctic in their character as to be new to the eye, and in regard to which botanical nomenclature but confuses and dissatisfies. And in all this vast extent of mountain scenery, with summits ranging from one thousand to fifteen thousand feet in height, there is not enough level land visible to aggregate one prairie county in Western Missouri or Kansas. Day after day there is a continuous and unbroken chain of mountain scenery. I can not better impress the character of the landscape, as seen from a vessel's deck, than to ask the reader to imagine the parks, valleys, cañons, gorges and depressions of the Rocky Mountains to be filled with water to the base of the snowy range, and then take a sail through them from Santa Fé to the northern line of Montana. Just about what could be seen on such an imaginary voyage is actually passed through in the sail now completed by our party of enthusiastic tourists for the past ten days. You may divide the scenery into parts by the days, and just as it was successively passed through, and any one of the subdivisions will furnish more grand combination of mountain and sea than can be seen anywhere on the globe. It is this vast profusion of scenery, this daily and hourly unrolling of the panorama, that overwhelms and confuses the observer. It is too great to be separated into details, and everything is platted on such a gigantic scale that all former experiences are dwarfed, and the imagination rejects the adjectives that have heretofore served for other scenes: to employ them here is only to mislead.”
“As one gentleman, a veteran traveler, remarked to me, as we stood looking north at the entrance to Glacier Bay, with the St. Elias Alps in full view, and Mounts Crillon and Fairweather overtopping the snow-covered peaks of that remarkable range:
“‘You can take just what we see here, and put it down on Switzerland, and it will hide all there is of mountain scenery in Europe.’ And then he added: ‘I have been all over the world; but you are now looking at a scene that has not its parallel elsewhere on the globe.’
“I cite this incident, as it is more descriptive, and gives a better idea of contrast than anything of my own could do, giving, as it does, to the reader, a conception of the vastness and immensity of the topographical aspect of the shores of the inland seas through whose labyrinthine passages we have for ten days past, and for ten days more to come will be lost to the outside world, where nature reigns undisturbed and unfretted by the hand of civilization.”
Here, under the solemn influence of Mount St. Elias, and in the northernmost waters of the greatest ocean of our planet, we turn southward to repeat in inverse order the things we have seen; or perchance, as often happens, down a number of new channels, with their varied scenery, before home is reached again.
I have given a certain order in which the few ports of Alaska are visited; but the reader must not for a moment think that this is always rigidly followed. Sometimes some of them are left for the return journey, and much depends on the amount of freight, and the number and character of passengers. In the winter the trips are made wholly with reference to mails, freight, and the few passengers; but in the spring, summer, and fall these are wholly subordinate, and the trips are converted into excursions in the broadest sense of the word. While thousands of little channels remain almost wholly unexplored, which probably would make the fortune of excursion companies if transported elsewhere, yet it is evident that the greater attractions of the great inland passage have been discovered, and are now shown to the tourists to the Wonderland of the World.
Fred'k Schwatka.
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