Ten large glaciers observed by us, and at least half as many more hidden by the mountain from our view, proceeding thus from an isolated peak, form a most remarkable system, and one worthy of a careful and detailed study.
Bailey Willis.
From a photograph taken in 1883.
IX. EXPLORATIONS ON THE NORTHERN SLOPES, 1881-1883
By BAILEY WILLIS
The Northwest for April, 1883, which was Number 2 of Volume I of that magazine, contained an article by Bailey Willis, Assistant Geologist of the Northern Transcontinental Survey. The article is entitled "Canyons and Glaciers. A Journey to the Ice Fields of Mount Tacoma." Mr. Willis was born at Idlewild-on-Hudson, New York, on May 31, 1857. It speaks well for his skill and training that he should have attained to such a position at twenty-four years of age.
Since then he has worked out a great career in the United States Geological Survey, in China and in other parts of the world. He is now Professor of Geology at Stanford University. He has kindly revised for this publication the product of his younger years. And there has also been found a photograph of the geologist as he appeared when the surveys were made.
To this day, people who visit the northern slopes and parks of the mountain become familiar with the Bailey Willis trail and from Moraine Park they get a view of the wonderful Willis Wall named in his honor.
The Puyallup River, which empties into Puget Sound near New Tacoma, heads in three glaciers on Mount Tacoma. During the summer months, when the ice and snow on the mountains are thawing, the water is discolored with mud from the glaciers and carries a large amount of sediment out to Commencement Bay. If the Coast Survey charts are correct, soundings near the centre of the bay have changed from one hundred fathoms and "no bottom" in 1867, to eighty fathoms and "gray mud" in 1877. But when the nights in the hills begin to be frosty, the stream becomes clearer, and in winter the greater volume of spring water gives it a deep green tint.
For twenty miles from the Sound the valley is nearly level. The bluffs along the river are of coarse gravel, the soil is alluvium, and a well sunk a hundred feet at the little town of Puyallup passed through gravel and sand to tide mud and brackish water. From the foot-hills to its mouth the river meanders over an old valley of unknown depth, now filled with material brought down by its several branches. About eighteen miles above its mouth the river forks, and the northern portion takes the name of Carbon River; the southern was formerly called the South Fork, but it should retain the name of Puyallup to its next division far up in the mountains. A short distance above their junction both Carbon River and the Puyallup escape from narrow, crooked cañons, whose vertical sides, one hundred to three hundred feet high, are often but fifty feet apart. From these walls steep, heavily timbered slopes rise two hundred to eight hundred feet to the summits of the foot-hills. These cañons link the buried river basin of the lower stream with the upper river valleys. The latter extend from the heads of the cañons to the glaciers. They are apparently the deserted beds of mightier ice rivers, now shrunk to the very foot of Mount Tacoma.