328 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1960 



Fairweatlier, a boundary peak and British Columbia's highest point, 

 had left their camp on the north shore of the bay shortly before, flying 

 to Juneau a day early because of some weather apprehension of their 

 KCAF pilot. 



In a violent break like that of July 9 the shearing motion spreads 

 rapidly outward through a complex system of rock faults. The Fair- 

 weather break reached the surface in a still-unexplored pattern of 

 cracked granite and slumped earth reaching more than 150 miles 

 through mountainous uplands and glacier-filled valleys — all the way 

 from Icy Strait north to the vast Malaspina Glacier that spews down 

 from the heights of the Cook- Augusta- St. Elias mountain massif. 

 A wild upheaval exploded over the land in what seismologists were 

 soon to rate one of America's greatest earthquakes. Boats at sea felt 

 unimaginable hammering from the water. One fisherman 121/2 miles 

 off Icy Point reported that despite a smooth sea he felt he was riding 

 on a big explosion — the worst experience he ever had. Another said 

 it felt like jumping 12 feet out of the water. 



The peaks of the Fairweather Range shivered visibly all the way 

 to the summit more than 15,000 feet above the sea. Avalanches slowly 

 began their descent amid great clouds of dust and flying snow. Some 

 thought it looked like the end of the world. A whole mountainside 

 came down at Point Astrolabe. The Swansons and the Ulrichs in 

 Lituya Bay rose in alarm to gaze in unbelieving wonder and terror. 

 Swanson and his wife later insisted that the terminal ice mass of 

 Lituya Glacier rose into view from behind a headland up the bay, 

 with great masses falling from its face, and then fell majestically into 

 the water, creating a wave that went over the whole headland. It 

 then caromed down the bay, scouring the shores of their trees, obliter- 

 ating the mountaineers' campsite, overrunning Cenotaph Island and 

 its lone cabin, and killing the Wagners and all but killing the Swan- 

 sons in a surfboard kind of plunge of their two boats across 40-foot- 

 high La Chaussee Spit to destruction in the sea outside — a wave of 

 such improbability as to strain the credulity of later investigators, and 

 to remain a scientific puzzle. 



A hundred miles of alluvial soils in the coastal lowlands shook and 

 danced, giving birth to uncounted sandboils, sulfur stenches, 20- to 

 30-foot geysers, and great cracks, one of which completely swallowed 

 a truck where it stood beside the Akwe River near Dry Bay. Several 

 men, thrown to the ground in a cabin on nearby East River, managed 

 to scramble out before its collapse, but found their escape through 

 the heaving landscape only with great difficulty. In Yakutat Bay the 

 Williams couple in their boat off Point Turner gasped when the outer 

 part of the point seemed to rise 20 feet in the air, then collapse in a 

 welter of churning waters that swallowed Tibbies and liis wife and 



