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JOHN MUIR 



flowing and grinding, making soil, and completing the 

 sculpture of their basins. As compared with the im- 

 mense icebergs which adorn and guard the shores of 

 Greenland and the Antarctic Continent those discharged 

 by the Alaska glaciers are small. The very largest I 

 have seen did not exceed a thousand feet in length, few 

 of them three or four hundred feet. And, so far as I have 

 observed, only from Glacier Bay, where the greatest 

 number of bergs are born, do any of them escape to the 

 open ocean. Nearly all are drifted back and forth by 

 wind and tide in the long island-blocked channels until 

 melted. 



The southmost of the glaciers which flow into arms of 

 the sea is the Le Conte. It occupies a narrow, forested, 

 picturesque fiord about ten miles north of the mouth of 

 the Stikine River, in latitude 56 50', called Hutli or 

 Thunder Bay by the Indians, from the noise made by the 

 rising and falling bergs. 



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MOUNTAINS ON LYNN CANAL OPPOSITE DAVIDSON GLACIER. 



Holkam or Sum Dum Bay, the next icy inlet to the 

 northwestward, is one of the most interesting of all the 



