Scenic Grandeur of Alaska 



[Two of my letters descriptive of Alaskan scenery were 

 misplaced, and afterward gave way to Camp-Fire Musings, 

 written subsequently. I notice in looking them over that I 

 had tried, with more than usual care, to make the scenery 

 visible to the imagination of the reader, who, I think, will 

 find them more vivid than any of my other attempts to por- 

 tray what I saw. The scene lay between Cook's Inlet and 

 Orca.] 



THERE is a glacier on the west side of 

 Cook's Inlet which I hesitate to describe, 

 for two or three reasons. First, I was no 

 nearer to it than the muddy channel, which, though 

 some thirty miles wide is all the time as full of mud 

 as the Missouri in a freshet. The tide rushes up 

 and down it at a seven-mile-per-hour gait, the mud- 

 laden water boiling up as one sees it in a rapid 

 stream. I was no nearer to the glacier than this 

 distance, twenty miles, probably; secondly, if I saw 

 it correctly, it is the most wonderful ice cataract 

 in the world, far and away a greater wonder than 

 the Muir glacier; and thirdly, why has it not been 

 investigated and described by others? 



The scene is a mountain basin, perhaps thirty 



miles wide, tilted toward the sea. On all but parts 



of the seaward side it is set about with a picket of 



sharp peaks; that is to say, the sides of the basin 



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