Aldsha. — Muir. 295 
■300 feet; but soundings made by captain Carroll show that about 
720 feet of the wall is below the surface, while still a third por- 
tion is buried beneath moraine material. Therefore, were the 
water and rocky detritus cleared away, a sheer wall of blue ice 
would be presented a mile and a half long and more than a 
thousand feet high. 
The number of bergs given otf varies somewhat with the tides 
and weather. For twelve consecutive hours I counted the num- 
ber discharged that were large enough to be heard like thunder at 
a distance of a mile or two, and found the rate to be one in five 
or six minutes. When one of the fissured masses falls there is 
first a heavy, plunging crash, then a deep, deliberate, long-drawn- 
out thundering roar, followed by clashing, grating sounds from 
the agitated bergs set in motion by the new arrival, and the swash 
of waves along the beach. All the very large bergs rise from 
the bottom with a still grander commotion, heaving aloft in the 
air nearly to the top of the wall, with tons of water pouring down 
their sides, heaving and plunging again and again ere they settle 
and sail awa}- as blue crystal Islands ; free at last, after being 
held rigid as part of the slow-crawling glacier for centuries. And 
strange it seems, that ice formed from snow on the mountains two 
and three hundred years ago, should after all its toil and travel 
in grinding down and fashioning the face of the landscape still 
remain so lovely in color and so pure. 
The rate of motion of the glacier as determined last summer by 
Prof.. Reid is, near the front, about from five to ten feet per day. 
This one glacier is made up of about 200 tributar}- glaciers, 
which drain an area of about a thousand square miles, and con 
tains more ice than all the eleven hundred glaciers of the Alps 
combined. The distance from the front back to the head of the 
farthest tributary is about fifty miles, and the width of the trunk 
below the confluence of the main triljutarics is twenty miles or 
more. 
I made my first visit to Glacier bay toward the end of October, 
1879. Winter weather had set in ; 3'oung ice was forming in the 
sheltered inlets, and the mountains had received a fresh covering 
of snow. It was then unexplored and unknown except to 
Indians. Vancouver, who surveyed the coast nearly a hundred 
years ago, missed it altogether, on account, 1 suppose, of bad 
weather and a jam of ice across its mouth. 
