Travels in Alaska 



steep mountainside in search of an accessible bench, 

 however narrow, where a bed and a fire might be gath- 

 ered for a camp. About dark great was my delight to 

 find a little shelf with a few small mountain hemlocks 

 growing in cleavage joints. Projecting knobs below it 

 enabled me to build a platform for a fireplace and a 

 bed, and by industrious creeping from one fissure to 

 another, cutting bushes and small trees and sliding 

 them down to within reach of my rock-shelf, I made 

 out to collect wood enough to last through the night. 

 In an hour or two I had a cheery fire, and spent 

 the night in turning from side to side, steaming and 

 drying after being wet two days and a night. For- 

 tunately this night it did not rain, but it was very 

 cold. 



Pushing on next day, I climbed to the top of the 

 glacier by ice-steps and along its side to the grand 

 cataract two miles wide where the whole majestic 

 flood of the glacier pours like a mighty surging river 

 down a steep declivity in its channel. After gazing a 

 long time on the glorious show, I discovered a place 

 beneath the edge of the cataract where it flows over a 

 hard, resisting granite rib, into which I crawled and 

 enjoyed the novel and instructive view of a glacier 

 pouring over my head, showing not only its grinding, 

 polishing action, but how it breaks off large angular 

 boulder-masses — a most telling lesson in earth- 

 sculpture, confirming many I had already learned in 

 the glacier basins of the High Sierra of California. I 

 then crossed to the south side, noting the forms of 

 the huge blocks into which the glacier was broken in 



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