My Sled-Trip on the Muir Glacier 



July 13. I skirted the mountain to eastward a few 

 miles and was delighted to discover a group of trees 

 high up on its ragged rocky side, the first trees I had 

 seen on the shores of Glacier Bay or on those of any 

 of its glaciers. I left my sled on the ice and climbed 

 the mountain to see what I might learn. I found that 

 all the trees were mountain hemlock {Tsuga merten- 

 siana), and were evidently the remnant of an old well- 

 established forest, standing on the only ground that 

 was stable, all the rest of the forest below it having 

 been sloughed off with the soil from the disintegrating 

 slate bed rock. The lowest of the trees stood at an 

 elevation of about two thousand feet above the sea, 

 the highest at about three thousand feet or a little 

 higher. Nothing could be more striking than the con- 

 trast between the raw, crumbling, deforested portions 

 of the mountain, looking like a quarry that was being 

 worked, and the forested part with its rich, shaggy 

 beds of cassiope and bryanthus in full bloom, and 

 its sumptuous cushions of flower-enameled mosses. 

 These garden-patches are full of gay colors of gentian, 

 erigeron, anemone, larkspur, and columbine, and are 

 enlivened with happy birds and bees and marmots. 

 Climbing to an elevation of twenty-five hundred 

 feet, which is about fifteen hundred feet above the 

 level of the glacier at this point, I saw and heard a 

 few marmots, and three ptarmigans that were as 

 tame as barnyard fowls. The sod is sloughing off on 

 the edges, keeping it ragged. The trees are storm- 

 bent from the southeast. A few are standing at an 

 elevation of nearly three thousand feet; at twenty- 



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