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Updated: June 7, 2025
Our dogs working well, it did not take us long to get over these slopes. At the next point we met with some small, very steep glaciers, and here we had to harness twenty dogs to each sledge and take the four sledges in two journeys. Some places were so steep that it was difficult to use our ski. Several times we were compelled by deep crevasses to turn back.
At that height, and even with the tide reduced by several immense crevasses, waters came over the New Orleans levees at a number of places, despite the fact that they were topped with several rows of sandbags. Captain Sherrill ascribed the unprecedented flood entirely to the rains in the river bed caused by last year's crevasses.
After we had sat awhile, smoking, the bo'sun divided us into two parties to make a search through the island among the rocks, perchance we should find water, collected from the rain, among the hollows and crevasses; for though we had gotten some, through our device with the sail, yet we had by no means caught sufficient for our needs.
It was a stiff fight over the upper glacier in latitude 85, with its razor-shaped ice, full of snow-covered crevasses, and three days out two of our best men fell into one of the worst of them. I saw the accident from a dozen yards away, and running up I lay on my stomach and shouted down, but it was a black bottomless gulf and not a sound or a sign came back to me.
After a quarter of an hour's progress we paused high above the "snout" of the great Eiger glacier, and descended by a short path on to it, examined the ice, its crevasses and layers, and its "glacier-grains," and watched and heard an avalanche.
In order to surmount the ice one skirts it for some distance where it is surrounded by rock-walls, until one comes to the old hard snow which bridges the crevasses and at most seasons of the year bears the weight of the climber. From the highest point of this snowfield, two peaks tower up, of which the one is higher and, therefore, the summit of the mountain.
I worked till nearly midnight getting out copy of route and bearings for Wright to navigate back on. Here is a specimen page of my diary: "December 21. "Out at 5.45 a.m. and away at 8. Had a very heavy pull up steep slope close to S.E. point of Buckley Island. Passed over many crevasses and dropped into some. Once I fell right down in a bottomless chasm to the length of my harness.
I decided to go down, since the lake lay on our course. After an hour of comparatively easy travel through the snow we noticed the thin beginnings of crevasses. Soon they were increasing in size and showing fractures, indicating that we were travelling on a glacier. As the daylight brightened the fog dissipated; the lake could be seen more clearly, but still we could not discover its east shore.
CREVASSES. Slight changes of slope in the glacier bed, and the different rates of motion in different parts, produce tensions under which the ice cracks and opens in great fissures called crevasses. At an abrupt descent in the bed the ice is shattered into great fragments, which unite again below the icefall. Crevasses are opened on lines at right angles to the direction of the tension.
By now we were exhausted, rudely shaken, and our eyes were smarting with the glare and the glint of the sun's reflections from that awful maze of ice falls. I felt my heart would burst from the sustained effort of launching that sledge, which now seemed to weigh a ton. There seemed no way out of this confused mass of pressure ridges and, crevasses.
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