416 ELIOT BLACKWELDER 
Pacific by an alluvial coastal plain. On the east side of Yakutat 
Bay low morainic deposits, densely wooded, slightly relieve the general 
flatness, and along the mountain front low rocky knobs rise to a 
height of too feet or more. Aside from these exceptions, the plain 
has the monotony of a delta surface. Much of it is covered with 
dense spruce forests; but wide tracts are kept bare by the floods" of 
such rivers as the Dangerous and the Alsek, and by the tides, as at 
the mouth of the Italio; while swamps and wet mossy prairies occupy 
large irregular areas farther inland. 
The Brabazon Range is low as compared with the lofty peaks west 
of it; but nevertheless it is a notable feature of the coast. It has a 
steep seaward front, which, although somewhat irregular in outline, 
plunges abruptly beneath the alluvial flat without extensive foot- 
hills or projecting spurs. One depression interrupts the continuity 
of the ridge in the area discussed—the open channel of the Yakutat 
Glacier. The highest peaks of this range are Mount Unana (6,000 
feet) and Mount Ruhamah (5,600 feet?) on the east side of Russell 
Fiord, together with Mount Reaburn$ (5,300 feet) and its nameless 
neighbors east of the Yakutat Glacier. Within the mountains the 
topography is buried under a thick mantle of ice, through which 
isolated mountains protrude—‘‘a land of nunataks,” as Russell has 
aptly described the country about Mount Logan. 
The only large river of the region is the Alsek—a powerful stream 
which rises in the plateau north of the mountainous belt and trenches 
the uplift in a series of wild canyons which have a total length of 
canyon of the Alsek River and fronts the foreland northwest as far as Russell Fiord. 
It is separated from the inner ranges largely and perhaps wholly by broad ice-fields. 
Structurally it seems to be continuous with the Puget peninsula on the northwest and 
Deception Hills on the southeast, but it is separated from them by the fiord and river 
mentioned. 
1 For an example of similar devastation by the Yatse River, see Russell ‘‘Second 
Expedition to Mt. St. Elias,’ U. S. Geological Survey, Annual Report, XIII, p. 60. 
2 Elevations taken from maps of the Canada-Alaska Boundary Award (based on 
Brabazon’s survey of 1895). 
3 This peak is named in honor of Mr. W. B. Reaburn, who, as a member of the U.S- 
Boundary Survey Party in 1906, was the first white man to cross the Yakutat Glacier, 
from the surface of which this peak is a conspicuous landmark. ‘The mountain is 
situated approximately in latitude 59° 263’ north and longitude 138° 383’ west, and is 
the first high peak east of the Yakutat Glacier. (See Fig. 3.) 
