Glacier Bay 



bloom is so abundant that a single handful plucked 

 at random contains hundreds of its pale pink bells. 

 The very thought of this Alaska garden is a joyful 

 exhilaration. Though the storm-beaten ground it is 

 growing on is nearly half a mile high, the glacier cen- 

 turies ago flowed over it as a river flows over a boulder; 

 but out of all the cold darkness and glacial crushing 

 and grinding comes this warm, abounding beauty and 

 life to teach us that what we in our faithless igno- 

 rance and fear call destruction is creation finer and 

 finer. 



When night was approaching I scrambled down 

 out of my blessed garden to the glacier, and returned 

 to my lonely camp, and, getting some coffee and 

 bread, again went up the moraine to the east end of 

 the great ice-wall. It is about three miles long, but 

 the length of the jagged, berg-producing portion that 

 stretches across the fiord from side to side like a huge 

 green-and-blue barrier is only about two miles and 

 rises above the water to a height of from two hundred 

 and fifty to three hundred feet. Soundings made by 

 Captain Carroll show that seven hundred and twenty 

 feet of the wall is below the surface, and a third un- 

 measured portion is buried beneath the moraine de- 

 tritus deposited at the foot of it. Therefore, were the 

 water and rocky detritus cleared away, a sheer preci- 

 pice of ice would be presented nearly two miles long 

 and more than a thousand feet high. Seen from a dis- 

 tance, as you come up the fiord, it seems compara- 

 tively regular in form, but it is far otherwise; bold, 

 jagged capes jut forward into the fiord, alternating 



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