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Updated: May 23, 2025
A range of mountains with precipitous slopes, forbidding peaks, and large glaciers lay immediately to the south of King Haakon Bay and seemed to form a continuation of the main range. Between this secondary range and the pass above our camp a great snow-upland sloped up to the inland ice-sheet and reached a rocky ridge that stretched athwart our path and seemed to bar the way.
This fragmentary ice-sheet, and the immense glaciers about Mount St.
As soon as they could hope to make any impression upon the great ice-sheet around them, the whole force of the company was to set to work at the task of extrication, and so all sledding journeys were to start in time to assure their return to the ship by the middle of December.
All have approximately the form of greatest strength with reference to the overflow of an ice-sheet, excepting those mentioned above, which have been more or less eroded by local residual glaciers. Every channel also has the form of greatest strength with reference to ice-action. Islands, as we have seen, are still being born in Glacier Bay and elsewhere to the northward.
On the 28th, however, the first sign of real promise occurred, for the whole ice-sheet began to sway very slightly under the action of a long swell, its edge against the land rising and falling as much as 18 inches. 'We are all very restless, constantly dashing up the hill to the lookout station or wandering from place to place to observe the effects of the swell.
I might venture to state, however, in this connection, that since the Sequoia forests present a more and more ancient aspect as they extend southward, I am inclined to think that the species was distributed from the south, while the Sugar Pine, its great rival in the northern groves, seems to have come around the head of the Sacramento valley and down the Sierra from the north; consequently, when the Sierra soil-beds were first thrown open to preemption on the melting of the ice-sheet, the Sequoia may have established itself along the available portions of the south half of the range prior to the arrival of the Sugar Pine, while the Sugar Pine took possession of the north half prior to the arrival of Sequoia.
We got well down to a part that seemed to overhang the sea and, to our delight, found a good solid-looking ice-sheet below us which certainly extended as far as Glacier Tongue. The drop here was twenty-five feet or so and Taylor and I were lowered over the cornice in an Alpine rope, then Wright and then the sledges, after that the remainder of the party.
Wrangell Island is about fourteen miles long, separated from the mainland by a narrow channel or fiord, and trending in the direction of the flow of the ancient ice-sheet. Like all its neighbors, it is densely forested down to the water's edge with trees that never seem to have suffered from thirst or fire or the axe of the lumberman in all their long century lives.
The ice-sheet was a huge mill that ground up the rocks in the North probably as fast or faster than the rains and the rank vegetation reduced them in the South, but the floods of water which it finally let loose carried a great deal of the rock-waste into the sea. The glacier milk which colors the streams that flow from beneath it finally settles and makes clay.
In the course of my studies I observed that the northern groves, the only ones I was at first acquainted with, were located on just those portions of the general forest soil-belt that were first laid bare toward the close of the glacial period when the ice-sheet began to break up into individual glaciers.
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