GLACIER BAY 19 



with slow movement on two sides in opposite directions, 

 part of the mass tending backward toward its original 

 source. 



Of the abundant evidence from which this history was 

 worked out by my predecessors l I saw only a small frac- 

 tion, but enough to substantiate their conclusions in all 

 essential respects. I skirted the barren coasts over which 

 vegetation is slowly creeping from the south. I saw 

 glacial till and gravel charged with bruised trunks and 

 boughs from the ancient forest. I saw the bare ice-carved 

 hills, still retaining striae and polish under a climate that 

 has obliterated from most exposed surfaces the similar 

 records of Pleistocene glaciation (pi. xvm). I saw the 

 banks of stratified gravel before Muir Glacier remnants 

 of the old moraine-delta and noted that their upper 

 surface had been first sculptured by the readvancing 

 glacier and then sheeted with till during the subsequent 

 retreat. And I saw a remnant of the ice flood stranded 

 on a saddle a thousand feet above tide. 



The saddle to which I refer is part of a small trough 

 extending southeast from Hugh Miller Inlet and lying 

 parallel to the adjacent great trough of Glacier Bay. 

 During the recent ice maximum an ice current followed 

 this trough from northwest to southeast, and when the 

 supply from the northwest finally ceased and this strand 

 of ice had nothing to urge it except its own weight, its 

 ends slid into neighboring valleys, but the central part lay 

 balanced on the summit and became stagnant (fig. 8). 

 The adjacent hills are too low to furnish the snow needed 

 to replenish its annual loss by melting, and so it is slowly 

 wasting away 



1 Wright, Am. Jour. Sci., 3d series, vol. xxxm, pp. 11-18, 1887; Ice Age, 

 pp. 55-62, 1889. Reid, Bull. Geol. Soc. Am., vol. 4, pp. 32-41, 1893; Sixteenth 

 Ann. Rept. U. S. Geol. Survey, part I, pp. 434-442, 1896. Gushing, Am. Geol., 

 vol. vin, pp. 214-224, 1891. 



