GLACIER BAY 
I 9 
with slow movement on two sides in opposite directions, 
part of the mass tending backward toward its original 
source. 
Of the abundant evidence from which this history was 
worked out by my predecessors 1 I saw only a small frac¬ 
tion, but enough to substantiate their conclusions in all 
essential respects. I skirted the barren coasts over which 
vegetation is slowly creeping from the south. I saw 
glacial till and gravel charged with bruised trunks and 
boughs from the ancient forest. I saw the bare ice-carved 
hills, still retaining striae and polish under a climate that 
has obliterated from most exposed surfaces the similar 
records of Pleistocene glaciation (pi. xviii). I saw the 
banks of stratified gravel before Muir Glacier — remnants 
of the old moraine-delta — and noted that their upper 
surface had been first sculptured by the readvancing 
glacier and then sheeted with till during the subsequent 
retreat. And I saw a remnant of the ice flood stranded 
on a saddle a thousand feet above tide. 
The saddle to which I refer is part of a small trough 
extending southeast from Hugh Miller Inlet and lying 
parallel to the adjacent great trough of Glacier Bay. 
During the recent ice maximum an ice current followed 
this trough from northwest to southeast, and when the 
supply from the northwest finally ceased and this strand 
of ice had nothing to urge it except its own weight, its 
ends slid into neighboring valleys, but the central part lay 
balanced on the summit and became stagnant (fig. 8). 
The adjacent hills are too low to furnish the snow needed 
to replenish its annual loss by melting, and so it is slowly 
wasting away 
1 Wright, Am. Jour. Sci., 3d series, vol. xxxm, pp. 11-18, 1887; Ice Age, 
pp. 55-62, 1889. Reid, Bull. Geol. Soc. Am., vol. 4, pp. 32-41, 1893; Sixteenth 
Ann. Rept. U. S. Geol. Survey, part 1, pp. 434-442, 1896. Cushing, Am. Geol., 
vol. viii, pp. 214-224, 1891. 
