120 I. C. Russell— Expedition to Mount St. Ellas. 



absolutely bare and desolate. An attempt has been made to re- 

 produce this scene in the picture forming plate 16. The drawing- 

 is from a photograph and shows the barren debris field stretch- 

 ing away towards the southwest. The extreme southern end of 

 the Hitchcock range appears at the right. In the distance is the 

 white ice of the central part of the Malaspina glacier. Far be- 

 yond, faintly outlined against the sky, are the snow-covered hills 

 west of Icy bay. The flowers in the foreground are growing on 

 the crest of the steep bluff bordering Blossom island on the south. 

 On the moraine-covered portion, especially where plants have 

 taken root, there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of lakelets 

 occupying kettle-shaped depressions. A view of one of these 

 interesting reservoirs in the ice is given in figure 2. If we should 

 go down to the glacier and examine such a lakelet near at hand, 

 we should find that the clifis of ice surrounding them are usually 

 unsymmetrical, being especially steep and rugged on one side 



FiGURfi 3 — Section of a glacial lakelet. 



and loAV or perhaps wanting entirely on the other. But there 

 is no regularity in this respect ; the steep slojDes may face in any 

 direction. On bright days the encircling walls are always drip- 

 ping with water produced by the melting of the ice ; little rills 

 are constantly flowing down their sides and plunging in minia- 

 ture cataracts into the lake below ; the stones at the top of the 

 ice-clifis, belonging to the general sheet of debris covering the 

 glacier, are continually being undermined and precipitated into 

 the water. A curious fact in reference to the walls of the lakelets 

 is that the melting of the ice below the surface is more rapid 

 than above, where it is exposed to the direct rays of the sun. 

 As a result the depressions have the form of an hour-glass, as 

 indicated in the accompanying section. 



Beyond the bordering moraines at our feet, we can look far out 

 over the ice-plateau and view hundreds of square miles of its 



