In Camp at Glacier Bay 



Island, seven thousand feet high, near the west margin 

 of the glacier. It is composed of crumbling granite 

 draggled with washed boulders, but has some endur- 

 ing bosses which on sides and top are polished and 

 scored rigidly, showing that it had been heavily over- 

 swept by the glacier when it was thousands of feet 

 deeper than now, like a submerged boulder in a river- 

 channel. This island is very irregular in form, owing 

 to the variations in the structure joints of the granite. 

 It has several small lakelets and has been loaded 

 with glacial drift, but by the melting of the ice about 

 its flanks is shedding it off, together with some of its 

 own crumbling surface. I descended a deep rock 

 gully on the north side, the rawest, dirtiest, dustiest, 

 most dangerous that I have seen hereabouts. There 

 is also a large quantity of fossil wood scattered on this 

 island, especially on the north side, that on the south 

 side having been cleared off and carried away by the 

 first tributary glacier, which, being lower and melting 

 earlier, has allowed the soil of the moraine material to 

 fall, together with its forest, and be carried off. That 

 on the north side is now being carried off or buried. 

 The last of the main ice foundation is melting and the 

 moraine material re-formed over and over again, and 

 the fallen tree-trunks, decayed or half decayed or in 

 a fair state of preservation, are also unburied and 

 buried again or carried off to the terminal or lateral 

 moraine. 



I found three small seedling Sitka spruces, feeble 

 beginnings of a new forest. The circumference of the 

 island is about seven miles. I arrived at camp about 



[ 289] 



