Sum Dum Bay 



or a thousand feet, it leaps a sheer precipice of about 

 two hundred and fifty feet, then divides and reaches 

 the tide-water in broken rapids over boulders. An- 

 other about a thousand feet high drops at once on 

 to the margin of the glacier two miles back from 

 the front. Several of the others are upwards of three 

 thousand feet high, descending through narrow 

 gorges as richly feathered with ferns as any channel 

 that water ever flowed in, though tremendously 

 abrupt and deep. A grander array of rocks and 

 waterfalls I have never yet beheld in Alaska. 



The amount of timber on the walls is about the 

 same as that on the Yosemite walls, but owing to 

 greater moisture, there is more small vegetation, — 

 bushes, ferns, mosses, grasses, etc.; though by far 

 the greater portion of the area of the wall-surface is 

 bare and shining with the polish it received when 

 occupied by the glacier that formed the fiord. The 

 deep-green patches seen on the mountains back of the 

 walls at the limits of vegetation are grass, where 

 the wild goats, or chamois rather, roam and feed. 

 The still greener and more luxuriant patches farther 

 down in gullies and on slopes where the declivity is 

 not excessive, are made up mostly of willows, birch, 

 and huckleberry bushes, with a varying amount of 

 prickly ribes and rubus and echinopanax. This 

 growth, when approached, especially on the lower 

 slopes near the level of the sea at the jaws of the 

 great side canons, is found to be the most impene- 

 trable and tedious and toilsome combination of 

 fighting bushes that the weary explorer ever fell into, 



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