124 I. C. Russell — Expedition to Mount St. Elias. 



had left them on the open ice. They waveclus '" good-bye " and 

 started back toward Blossom island, leaving our little band of 

 four to make the advance. 



Descending into a deep black gorge at the border of the ice, 

 formed by its melting back from the bordering cliffs, we clam- 

 bered upward beneath overhanging ice-walls, from which stones 

 and fragments of ice were occasionally dropping, and finally 

 reached a great snow-bank on the border of the glacier. As the 

 storm still continued, and was even increasing in force, we con- 

 cluded to find a camping ground soon as possible and make our- 

 selves comfortable as the circumstances would permit. 



First Camp in the Snow. 



We had now reached the lower limit of perpetual snow. There 

 were no more moraines on the surface of the glacier, and no bare 

 rock surfaces large enough to hold a tent. The entire region 

 was snow-mantled as far as the eye could see, except where 

 pinnacles and cliff's too steep and rugged for the snow to accu- 

 mulate rose above the general surface. A little to one side of 

 the mouth of a steep lateral gorge we found a spot in which a 

 mass of partly disintegrated shale had fallen down from the cliff. 

 We scraped the fragments aside, smoothed the snow beneath, 

 and built a wall of rock along the lower margin. The space 

 above was filled in with fragments of shale, so as to form a shelf 

 on which to pitch our tent. Soon our blankets were spread, 

 with our water-proof coats for a substratum, and supper was pre- 

 pared over the oil-stove. 



Darkness settled down over the mountains, and the storm in- 

 creased as the night came on. What is unusual in Alaska, 

 the rain fell in torrents, as in the tropics. Our little tent of 

 light cotton cloth afforded great protection, but the rain-drops 

 beat on it with such force that the spray was driven through and 

 made a fine rain within. Weary with many hours of hard trav- 

 eling over moraines and across crevassed ice, and in an atmos- 

 phere saturated with moisture, we rolled ourselves in our blankets, 

 determined to rest in spite of the storm that raged about. 



As the rain became heavier, the avalanches, already alarmingly 

 numerous, became more and more frequent : A crash like 

 thunder, followed by the clatter of falling stones, told that many 

 tons of ice and rocks on the mountains to the westward had slid 



