Travels in Alaska 



June 25. A rainy day. For a few hours I kept 

 count of the number of bergs discharged, then saun- 

 tered along the beach to the end of the crystal wall. 

 A portion of the way is dangerous, the moraine bluff 

 being capped by an overlying lobe of the glacier, 

 which as it melts sends down boulders and fragments 

 of ice, while the strip of sandy shore at high tide is 

 only a few rods wide, leaving but little room to escape 

 from the falling moraine material and the berg- 

 waves. The view of the ice-cliffs, pinnacles, spires and 

 ridges was very telling, a magnificent picture of na- 

 ture's power and industry and love of beauty. About 

 a hundred or a hundred and fifty feet from the shore 

 a large stream issues from an arched, tunnel-like 

 channel in the wall of the glacier, the blue of the ice 

 hall being of an exquisite tone, contrasting with the 

 strange, sooty, smoky, brown-colored stream. The 

 front wall of the Muir Glacier is about two and a half 

 or three miles wide. Only the central portion about 

 two miles wide discharges icebergs. The two wings 

 advanced over the washed and stratified moraine de- 

 posits have little or no motion, melting and receding 

 as fast, or perhaps faster, than it advances. They have 

 been advanced at least a mile over the old re-formed 

 moraines, as is shown by the overlying, angular, 

 recent moraine deposits, now being laid down, which 

 are continuous with the medial moraines of the gla- 

 cier. 



In the old stratified moraine banks, trunks and 

 branches of trees showing but little sign of decay 

 occur at a height of about a hundred feet above tide- 



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