T^he Stickeen Glaciers 



to be able to set the question at rest, at least as far as I 

 was concerned. 



The glacier and the mountains about it are on so 

 grand a scale and so generally inaccessible in the 

 ordinary sense, it seemed to matter but little what 

 course I pursued. Everything was full of interest, 

 even the weather, though about as unfavorable as 

 possible for wide views, and scrambling through the 

 moraine jungle brush kept one as wet as if all the way 

 was beneath a cascade. 



I pushed on, with many a rest and halt to admire 

 the bold and marvelously sculptured ice-front, look- 

 ing all the grander and more striking in the gray mist 

 with all the rest of the glacier shut out, until I came 

 to a lake about two hundred yards wide and two 

 miles long with scores of small bergs floating in it, 

 some aground, close inshore against the moraine, the 

 light playing on their angles and shimmering in their 

 blue caves in ravishing tones. This proved to be the 

 largest of the series of narrow lakelets that lie in 

 shallow troughs between the moraine and the glacier, 

 a miniature Arctic Ocean, its ice-cliif s played upon by 

 whispering, rippling wavelets and its small berg floes 

 drifting in its currents or with the wind, or stranded 

 here and there along its rocky moraine shore. 



Hundreds of small rills and good-sized streams 

 were falling into the lake from the glacier, singing in 

 low tones, some of them pouring in sheer falls over 

 blue cliifs from narrow ice-valleys, some spouting 

 from pipelike channels in the solid front of the glacier, 

 others gurgling out of arched openings at the base. All 



[ 107] 



