The Discovery of Glacier Bay 



poulticed in wet or damp clothing night and day, my 

 limbs had been asleep. This day they were awakened 

 and in the hour of trial proved that they had not lost 

 the cunning learned on many a mountain peak of 

 the High Sierra. I reached a height of fifteen hundred 

 feet, on the ridge that bounds the second of the great 

 glaciers. All the landscape was smothered in clouds 

 and I began to fear that as far as wide views were con- 

 cerned I had climbed in vain. But at length the 

 clouds lifted a little, and beneath their gray fringes I 

 saw the berg-filled expanse of the bay, and the feet of 

 the mountains that stand about it, and the imposing 

 fronts of five huge glaciers, the nearest being immedi- 

 ately beneath me. This was my first general view of 

 Glacier Bay, a solitude of ice and snow and newborn 

 rocks, dim, dreary, mysterious. I held the ground I 

 had so dearly won for an hour or two, sheltering my- 

 self from the blast as best I could, while with be- 

 numbed fingers I sketched what I could see of the 

 landscape, and wrote a few lines in my notebook. 

 Then, breasting the snow again, crossing the shifting 

 avalanche slopes and torrents, I reached camp about 

 dark, wet and weary and glad. 



While I was getting some coffee and hardtack, Mr. 

 Young told me that the Indians were discouraged, 

 and had been talking about turning back, fearing that 

 I would be lost, the canoe broken, or in some other 

 mysterious way the expedition would come to grief if 

 I persisted in going farther. They had been asking 

 him what possible motive I could have in climbing 

 mountains when storms were blowing; and when he 



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