i6o 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



reports four glaciers of considerable size in the course of this short 

 portage between Chilkat and Lake Lindeman.* The vast region 

 through which the Yukon flows to the north of these mountains 

 is not known to contain any extensive glaciers. But, according 

 to the reports of Dall, Schwatka, and others, it is a most inhospi- 

 table country, where human life can be maintained only with the 

 greatest difficulty ; where the thermometer sinks to 60° below zero 

 in winter, and rises for a short period to 120° in the summer ; and 

 where the ground remains perpetually frozen at a short depth 

 below the surface. 



Fig. 4.— Davidson Glacier, near Chilkat, Alaska, latitude 59° 45>. The mountains are from 

 five thousand to seven thousand feet high ; the gorge about three quarters of a mile wide ; the 

 front of the glacier, three miles; the terminal moraine, about two hundred and fifty feet high. 

 (View from two miles distant.) 



From Cross Sound, about latitude 58° and longitude 136° west 

 from Greenwich, to the Alaskan Peninsula, the coast is bordered 

 by a most magnificent semicircle of mountains opening to the 

 south, and extending for more than a thousand miles. Through- 

 out this whole extent, glaciers of large size are everywhere to be 

 seen. Elliott \ estimates that, counting great and small, there can 

 not be less than five thousand glaciers between Dixon's Entrance 

 and the extremity of the Alaskan Peninsula. 



Little is known in detail of the glaciers of this region. But 

 those in the neighborhood of Mount St. Elias are evidently the 

 largest anywhere to be found in the northern hemisphere outside 

 of Greenland. This mountain rises 19,500 feet above the sea; and 

 Lieutenant Schwatka, in his expedition of 1886, reported eleven 

 glaciers as coming down from its southern side. One of these, 



* "Science," vol. iii (February 22, 1884), pp. 220-22*7. 

 ■f See " Our Arctic Province," p. 91. 



