UNALASKA ISLAND 185 



since risen, than to the hypothesis that the land was then 

 high and has since subsided. 



UNALASKA ISLAND 



On two occasions we spent a few hours at Dutch Har- 

 bor, making short excursions in the immediate neighbor- 

 hood, and we also sailed along the north coast on a foggy 

 day. The opportunities for observation thus afforded 

 were much more limited than those enjoyed by Russell, 1 

 and my notes are chiefly of service as affording verifica- 

 tion of his description. The north coast, west of Cape 

 Cheerful, is faced by a high sea cliff which testifies to 

 rapid aggression by waves. The cliff shows in cross- 

 section a number of U-shaped valleys, and these, so far as 

 the fog permitted us to see them, have the simple contours 

 characteristic of complete adjustment to the conditions of 

 ice flow. Several of them end hundreds of feet above the 

 sea, this condition being manifestly due to truncation by 

 the receding shore cliff. One of them reaches the shore 

 at tide-level, and the walls of that one seemed to be 

 sheathed with a layer of drift in which post-glacial rills 

 and brooklets have cut narrow gashes. The shore cliff 

 also truncates, at rather high levels, a few V-shaped 

 gorges, and the association of these with the glacial troughs 

 gave the impression that the Pleistocene glaciers were of 

 alpine type and not confluent. As the mountains were 

 concealed by fog, I was unable to observe the cirques of 

 which Russell makes mention. 



The forms of the hills about Unalaska Bay are not typi- 

 cally glacial, but, on the other hand, they are not con- 

 structional (with a single exception), and if products of 

 atmospheric waste, they are of unusual type. The single 

 constructional form is a young volcanic cone near Cape 

 Cheerful. The other hills are also of volcanic rock, but 



1 Bull. Geol. Soc. Amer., vol. i, pp. 138-140, 1890. 



