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While a valley glacier carries much of its load on top, an ice sheet, such as that of Greenland, is free from surface debris, except where moraines trail away from some nunatak. If at its edge it breaks into separate glaciers which drain down mountain valleys, these tongues of ice will carry the selvages of waste common to valley glaciers.

Now in this extraordinary manner the curtain had been raised... and down the valley we could see the high cliffs of the Depôt Nunatak where peace and plenty awaited us.

Yet in the spring of 1988, stung by memories of friendship and deceit in Rama's nest, I stumbled my way past the burned-out car abandoned on the charred foundation of 9514 La Jolla Farms Road. I let Nunatak lead me in the fading light through the parched chaparral. She gently tugged me back to the present. One-and-a-half miles east of campus, I opened the door of my Volkswagon Bus.

First we had Mount Hope at the lower end of the Glacier. Mount Hope is a nunatak of granite, about 2800 feet in height, of which the summit is strewn with erratics, giving evidence of former glaciation of far greater extent.

An old Indian I talked with at the mission told me he had made it once on a hunting trip, and Weatherbee you all remember David Weatherbee was eager to try it with me. The Tlinket helped us with the outfit, canoeing around the bay and up into the Arm to his starting point across Nunatak glacier. But it took all three of us seventy-two days to pack the year's supplies over the ice.

At this southern end of the Caird Coast the ice-sheet, undulating over the hidden and imprisoned land, is bursting down a steep slope in tremendous glaciers, bristling with ridges and spikes of ice and seamed by thousands of crevasses. Along the whole length of the coast we have seen no bare land or rock. Not as much as a solitary nunatak has appeared to relieve the surface of ice and snow.

"Maybe I'll take myself for a ride across America and do some thinking." Bicycle Ride The Continental Divide Three months into the cross-country bicycle trek, I pulled off the road west of Walden, Colorado. I was stuck. The problem was not so much the physical journey. True, I was towing additional weight because towns were farther apart and because Nunatak was no longer a pup.

I parked my Volkswagon Bus at a mall one-and-a-half miles east of campus and walked with Nunatak toward the sea. I had cut through the not-yet-bulldozed chaparral just east of Interstate-5 many times since returning to UCSD a twenty-seven year old undergraduate but now the sun was setting and the air seemed heavy. Suddenly, I had a sense of where I was going.

Then I pulled my sled over close to Nunatak cliff, made haste to strip off my clothing, threw it in a sloppy heap and crept into my sleeping-bag to shiver away the night as best I could. July 21. Dressing this rainy morning was a miserable job, but might have been worse. After wringing my sloppy underclothing, getting it on was far from pleasant.

I had to look after camp-supplies and left the ship late this morning, going with a crowd to the glacier; then, taking advantage of the fine weather, I pushed off alone into the silent icy prairie to the east, to Nunatak Island, about five hundred feet above the ice. I discovered a small lake on the larger of the two islands, and many battered and ground fragments of fossil wood, large and small.