294 The American Geologist. May, isos 
which at certain seasons there is more fish than water. Once 1 
saw one of my men wade into the midst of a crowded run and 
amuse himself by picking up the salmon and throwing them over 
his head. On rocky shallows thousands could thus be taken by 
hand in an hour or two. 
The steamer now goes down the, canal, through Icy strait, and 
into the wonderful Glacier bay. All the voyage thus far from 
Wrangel has been icy, and you have seen hundreds of glaciers 
great and small. But this bay and the region about it and be- 
yond it towards mount St. Elias is pre-eminently the Iceland of 
Alaska and the entire Pacific coast. 
Glancing for a moment at the results of a general exploration 
we find that there are between sixty and seventy small residual 
glaciers in the California sierra. Through Oregon and Washing- 
ton, glaciers, some of them of considerable size, still exist on the 
highest volcanic cones of the Cascade mountains — the Three 
Sisters, mounts Jefferson, Hood, St. Helens, Adams, Tacoma, 
Baker, and others, though none of them approach the sea. 
Through British Columbia and southeastern Alaska the broad 
sustained chain of mountains extending along the coaet is gener- 
ally glacier-bearing. The upper branches of nearly &xexy canon 
are occupied by glaciers, which gradually increase in size to the 
northward until the lofty region between Glacier ba}' and mount 
St. Elias is reached. In Prince William sound and Cook's inlet 
many grand glaciers are found, but farther to the westward, along 
the Alaska peninsula and the chain of the Aleutian islands, 
though a considerable number of glaciers occur on the highest 
peaks, they are quite small and melt far above sea-level, while to 
the north of latitude 02°, few, if an}', remain in existence: the 
ground being comparatively low, and the snowfall light. 
The largest of the glaciers that discharge into Glacier bay is 
the Muir, and being also the most accessible is the one to which 
tourists are taken and allowed to go ashore and climb about its 
ice cliffs and watch the huge blue bergs as with tremendous 
thundering roar and surge they emerge and plunge from the ma- 
jestic vertical ice-wall in which the glacier terminates. 
The front of the glacier is about three miles wide, but the 
central berg-producing portion, that stretches across from side to 
side of the inlet like a huge jagged barrier, is only about half as 
wide. The hight of the ice-wall above the water is from 250 to 
