THE HARRIMAN ALASKA EXPEDITION 509 



cases these glaciers still extend so far downward as to protrude 

 their fronts into the deep water of the fiords. 



A few thousand years ago, perhaps at the time the Egyptian 

 pyramids were rising, the fiords which form the inland passages 

 now traversed by the tourist were filled with great rivers of ice 

 from the sea bottom nearly to the mountain summits. Indeed, 

 the ice was spread in great sheets, covering all but the highest 

 mountains. The retreat of the ice, though apparently slow, has 

 yet been at so rapid a rate that the oldest land, which first, 

 emerged, has suffered little from subsequent aqueous erosion. 

 The glacial carving is still strongly in evidence, and this in a 

 region of excessive rainfall and steep slopes, where aqueous ero- 

 sion is at a maximum. From these oldest regions, densely forest- 

 clad, with the remains of older forests under foot, we may pass, 

 going up the fiords to land continuously younger. As we ap- 

 proach the glacier the older, dead forests disappear. There is now 

 but a single generation of trees, and these become younger and 

 smaller. Soon they are succeeded by alder and willow bushes ; 

 then by grasses and annual plants, by mosses, and other low 

 forms of vegetation, and, finally, by bare rock ridges, polished 

 and scoured by ice and by bare glacial gravel a few miles only 

 from the ice-front. 



The glaciers are still retreating. The next generation will find 

 few of them with their fronts still in the sea, discharging bergs. 

 The thunder of the glacier, as it breaks off into the sea, will soon 

 be no more heard in the land. A century ago, when Malaspina 

 explored these shores, the ice extended much farther down the 

 fiords than now. They found fiords closed which now are open, 

 and their charts show that the inlets then extended far less deeply 

 into the land. Malaspina sailed up Yakutat bay, passed Haencke 

 island, and for the moment believed that to him it had been 

 given to discover the long-sought northwest passage, but he was 

 soon confronted by a blank wall of ice, which, extending from 

 side to side, barred further passage. Sadly he named this upper 

 portion of Yakutat bay Disenchantment bay, for his dream was 

 over. Now the ice barrier, the front of Hubbard glacier, has re- 

 treated, and ships may pass 25 miles farther, away to the head 

 of Russell fiord, as the southward extension of Yakutat bay has 

 been named, in honor of Prof. I. C. Russell, who first explored 

 it. When this fiord was dammed by the ice-front of Hubbard 

 glacier it became a lake, with its level some 200 feet above sea, 

 as shown by lake benches along its walls. Then it overflowed 



