Travels in Alaska 



from the flowery summit of which, the day being clear, 

 the vast glacier and its principal branches were dis- 

 played in one magnificent view. Instead of a stream 

 of ice winding down a mountain-walled valley like the 

 largest of the Swiss glaciers, the Muir looks like a 

 broad undulating prairie streaked with medial mo- 

 raines and gashed with crevasses, surrounded by 

 numberless mountains from which flow its many 

 tributary glaciers. There are seven main tributaries 

 from ten to twenty miles long and from two to six 

 miles wide where they enter the trunk, each of them 

 fed by many secondary tributaries ; so that the whole 

 number of branches, great and small, pouring from 

 the mountain fountains perhaps number upward of 

 two hundred, not counting the smallest. The area 

 drained by this one grand glacier can hardly be less 

 than seven or eight hundred miles, and probably con- 

 tains as much ice as all the eleven hundred Swiss 

 glaciers combined. Its length from the frontal wall 

 back to the head of its farthest fountain seemed to be 

 about forty or fifty miles, and the width just below 

 the confluence of the main tributaries about twenty- 

 five miles. Though apparently motionless as the 

 mountains, it flows on forever, the speed varying in 

 every part with the seasons, but mostly with the 

 depth of the current, and the declivity, smoothness 

 and directness of the different portions of the basin. 

 The flow of the central cascading portion near the 

 front, as determined by Professor Reid, is at the rate 

 of from two and a half to five inches an hour, or from 

 five to ten feet a day. A strip of the main trunk about 



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