Rensselaer Republican, Volume 16, Number 5, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 October 1883 — AN ALASKA GLACIER. [ARTICLE]

AN ALASKA GLACIER.

4 Mountain of Glittering Ice Cnckllnf In the Sun. [Cor St. Louis Globe-Democrat.J Mount Crillon showed his, hoary head in glimpses between the clouds, and then rounding "Willoughby Island,which tile owner declares is solid marble of a quality to riy&l'that of Peptilicus and Carrara, we saw the full front of the great glacier. At the first breathless glance at that glorious ice world all fancies and dreams were surpassed, and the marvelous beauty of those shining, silvery pinnacles and spires, the deep blue buttresses, the arches and aisles of that fretted front struck one with awe. In all Switzerland there is nothing comparable to these Alaska glaciers, where the frozen waters rise straight from the sea, and a steamer can go up w ithin an eighth of a mile and cruise beside them. Add to the picture of high mountains and snowy glaciers a sapphire bay scattered over with glittering little icebergs, and nature can supply nothing more to stir one’s soul, to rouse the fancy and imagination, and enchant the senses. The vastness of this Muir glacier is enough alone to overpower one with a sense of the Blight and strength of these forces of nature. Dry figures can give one little idea of the great desolate stretches of gray ice and snow that slope out of sight behind the jutting mountains, and the 4 tumbled and broken front forced down and into the sea. Although not half of the glacier has been explored it is said to extend back 400 miles, while by a side glacier it connects with the Davidson Glacier on Lynn Channel. What we could know accurately was that the front of the glacier was two miles across and that the ice wall rose 500 and 1,000 feet from the water. The lead cast at the point nearest the icy front gave eighty fathoms or 240 feet of Water, and in the midst of those deep soundings, icebergs, filled with boulders, lay grounded with forty feet of their summits visible above the water. At very low tide there is a continual crash of falling ice, and for the half day that we speflt beside this glacier there was a roar as of artillery every few minutes, when tons of ice would go thundering down into the water. We scrambled, oxer two miles of loose round boulders, beside a roaring river, until we came to its subterranean source at the side of the glacier. It was a hard three miles of climbing from the boats to the level field of ice, and then we wandered at will over the seamed and ragged surface. The ice crackled under our feet with a pleasant mid-winter sound and the wind blew keenly from over those hundreds of miles of glacier fields, but there was the gurgle and hollow' roar of the water heard in every deep crevasse, and trickling streams spread a silver network in the sunshine. The amateur photographers turned their cameras’to right and left, risked their necks in deep ravines and climbed the surrounding points to get satisfactory views. Every one gathered a pocketful of round pebbles and shreds of ancient cedar trees carried down by the flood, and then, having w orn rubber shoes and boots to tatters on the sharp ice and sunk many times in the treacherous mud, we reluctantly obeyed the steamer’s whistle and started back to the boats. A magnigeent sunset flooded the sky that night and filled every icy ravine with rose and orange lights. At the last view of the glacier, as we steamed away from it, the whole brow was glorified and transfigured with the fires of sunset; the blue and silvery pinnacles, the white and shining front floating dreamlike on a roseate and amber sea, and the range and circle of dull violet mountains lighting their glowing summits into a sky flecked with crimson and gold. .