LOWE INLET 23 



huts of trappers and hunters. The eternal spruce and 

 hemlock forests grow monotonous. The many dry, white 

 trunks of dead trees, scattered evenly through the forest, 

 make the mountains look as if a shower of gigantic arrows 

 had fallen upon them from the sky. Gulls, loons, and 

 scoters are seen at long intervals. 



Snow avalanches have swept innumerable paths, broad 

 and narrow, down through the spruce forest. Those 

 great glacier basins on our left invite inspection, so we 

 send a party ashore to examine one of them. They do 

 not find the expected lake, but in its stead a sphagnum 

 bog, through which the creek winds its way. Fresh 

 tracks and spoor of deer are seen. 



In mid-afternoon we turn into Lowe Inlet, a deep nar- 

 row mountain-locked arm of the sea on our right, with a 

 salmon cannery at the head of it, and a large rapid trout 

 stream making a fine waterfall. Here, among the em- 

 ployees of the cannery, we see our first Alaska Indians and 

 note their large, round, stolid innocent faces. Here also 

 some of us get our first taste of Alaska woods. In trying 

 to make our way to the falls we are soon up to our necks 

 amid moss, fallen timber and devil's club. Progress is all 

 but impossible, and those who finally reach the falls do so 

 by withdrawing from the woods and taking to boats. 

 Traversing Alaska forests must be a trying task even to 

 deer and bears. They have apparently never been purged 

 or thinned by fire — too damp for that — and they are choked 

 with the accumulation of ages. Two or three generations 

 of fallen trees cross one another in all directions amid the 

 rocks, with moss over all like a deep fall of snow, and 

 worse still, thickly planted with devil's club. This is a 

 shrub as high as your head, covered with long sharp spines 

 and with large thorny leaves. It is like a blackberry 

 bush with thorns ten times multiplied. It hedges about 

 these mossy cushions as with the fangs of serpents. One 



