134 



JOHN MUIR 



west shore of Cook Inlet, the Alaska Peninsula, and the 

 Aleutian Islands. Several of the great white cones were 

 sending up plumes of smoke or steam 200 or 300 feet 

 high and sending down broad glaciers nearly to the 

 shore line. 





ICE WALL OF COLUMBIA GLACIER. 



After leaving 



-- Unalaska and 



entering Bering 



Sea not a glacier 



of any sort was seen, though the 



traces of ancient ones are not 



rare, especially in the fiords 

 and low mountain ranges. Plover Bay on the Siberian 

 Coast, in which the Expedition made a short stay, and 

 which I explored in 1881, is a well characterized glacier 

 fiord. Its walls rise to an average height of about 2,000 

 feet and present a severely desolate and bedraggled ap- 

 pearance, owing to the crumbling condition of the rocks, 

 which in most places are being rapidly disintegrated, 

 loading the slopes with loose detritus wherever the 

 angle is low enough to allow it to rest. But on the 

 most resisting portions I discovered rounded glaciated 

 surfaces, grooved, scratched and polished, from near the 

 sea level up to a height of a thousand feet or more. 

 And in high, spacious cirques I found well formed un- 

 wasted moraines made up of concentric masses shoved 

 together, indicating that the glaciers to which they be- 

 longed receded with changes of level and rate of de- 



