I. 0. Russell — Mt. St. Elias and its Glaciers. 171 



north of the St. Elias range. The day was unusually beau- 

 tiful aud a strange land, which had never before been seen 

 by man, lay spread out like a map beneath our feet. Hav- 

 ing previously crossed the mountain system of which the St. 

 Elias range forms a part, some 200 miles east of Mt. St Elias, 

 and traversed the countiw to the northward, I expected on reach- 

 ing the divide between Mt. Newton and Mt. St. Elias, to behold 

 a similar region. I pictured to myself a comparatively low for- 

 ested land, interspersed with lakes, and divided by streams, and 

 perhaps giving some signs of human occupation. But I was 

 entirely mistaken. What did meet my astonished gaze was a vast 

 snow-covered region, limitless in its expanse, through which hun- 

 dreds and probably thousands of barren, angular mountain peaks 

 project. There was not a stream, not a lake, and not a vestige of 

 vegetation in sight. A more desolate or a more utterly lifeless 

 land one never beheld. Yast, smooth, snow surfaces, without 

 crevasses or breaks, stretched away to seemingly limitless dis- 

 tances, diversified only by jagged and angular mountain peaks. 

 The general elevation of the snow surface is about 8,000 feet, 

 while the mountain peaks which pierce it are from ten to twelve 

 thousand feet or more, in altitude above the sea. To the north 

 I could see every detail in the forbidding landscape for miles 

 and miles. The most distant peaks in that direction were 

 forty or fifty miles away. To the southeast was Mt. Fair- 

 weather, sharply defined against the sky, although 200 miles 

 distant. About an equal distance to the northwest are two 

 prominent mountain ranges, the highest peaks of which ap- 

 peared to be as lofty as Mt. Fairweather. These are in the 

 vicinity of Mt. Wrangell, but no volcanic vapor could be seen 

 about them. Whether any one of them was Mt. Wrangell or 

 not I was not able to decide. 



The view to the north called to mind the pictures that ex- 

 plorers give of the borders of the great Greenland ice sheet, 

 where many rocky islands, known as nunatahs, alone break 

 the monotony of the boundless sea of ice. The region before 

 me was a land of nunataks. 



If those of my readers who are familiar with the Great 

 Basin of the Far West, will fancy the most desolate portion of 

 that arid region buried beneath a thousand feet of snow and ice, 

 leaving only the southern slopes of the most rugged peaks 

 exposed, they will have a mental picture of the land of desola- 

 tion north of Mt. St. Elias. 



Owing to long continued stormy weather, we were forced to 

 abandon the hope of reaching the summit of Mt. St. Elias and 

 returned to Icy bay. 



On reaching the flat lands along the ocean, near the mouth 

 of the Yahtse, we measured a base line three miles long and 



