Glacier Bay

“ Heading for Glacier Bay, we found a flood of bitter cold water so filled with floating ice that it was quite impossible to avoid frequent collisions with masses of more or less magnitude. There was an almost continual thumping along the ship's side as the paddle struck heavily the ice fragments which we found littering the frozen sea. There was also a dull reverberation as of distant thunder that rolled over the sea to us; and when we learned that this was the crackling of the ice-pack in the gorges, we thought with increasing solemnity of the majesty of the spectacle we were about to witness. ”

“ The glaciers of Glacier Bay are the largest in Alaska. Formed among the highest crags of the Fairweather range, they gradually deepen and widen as they near the sea, and end, at last, in massive cliffs of solid ice, often measuring three hundred feet high, and having a width of several miles. The surface of the glaciers is rough and billowy, resembling the waves of a troubled sea frozen into solid blocks of ice at the moment of their wildest gambols. ”

“ We passed by Muir Glacier on the other side of the bay, seeking to attain the extreme end of the great fiord. We estimated the distance by the tide and our rate of rowing, tracing the shore-line and islands as we went along and getting the points of the compass from our little pocket instrument.
Rain was falling almost constantly during the week we spent in Glacier Bay. Now and then the clouds would lift, showing the twin peaks of La Perouse and the majestic summits of Mts. Fairweather and Crillon. ”

“ Vancouver’s boats passed by Glacier Bay during his third cruise on this coast, and his men saw only frozen mountains and an expanse of ice as far as the eye could reach. It is only within a decade that anything has been known of the extent of the great bay at the foot of the Fairweather Alps, and no surveys have been made of its shores to correct the imperfect charts now in use. Revenue cutters, men-of-war, and traders’ ships had gone as far as the entrance, but were prevented from advancing by adverse winds and currents, floating ice, and shoaling waters. ”

“ Fairweather is the most beautiful of all the giants that stand guard about Glacier Bay. When the sun is shining on it from the east or south its magnificent glaciers and colors are brought out in most telling display. ”

“ A day's sail brought us to a little, heavily wooded island near the mouth of Glacier Bay. This we named Pleasant Island.
As we broke camp in the morning our guide said: "We must take on board a supply of dry wood here, as there is none beyond."
Leaving this last green island we steered northwest into the great bay, the country of ice and bare rocks. Muir's excitement was increasing every moment, and as the majestic arena opened before us and the Muir, Geicke, Pacific and other great glaciers (all nameless as yet) began to appear, he could hardly contain himself. ”

“ But little Stickeen seemed to enjoy the storm, and gazed at the foam-wreathed cliffs like a dreamy, comfortable tourist admiring a sunset. We reached the mouth of Taylor Bay about two or three o'clock in the afternoon, when we had a view of the open ocean before we entered the bay. Many large bergs from Glacier Bay were seen drifting out to sea past Cape Spencer. We reached the head of the fiord now called Taylor Bay at five o'clock and camped near an immense glacier with a front about three miles wide stretching across from wall to wall. ”

“ Into this glorious fiord we steamed to its head at Chilkat, and then back to enter Glacier Bay, the acme of Alaska's wonderful exhibitions.
Fully nine Alaskan tourists out of ten go for its glaciers, which are seen in a magnitude and grandeur inducing one to pass as scarcely worthy of notice, the best of any other country which is possible of approach. They are seen in icy hardness on distant summits shortly after passing the boundary of British Columbia. They increase in frequency as one goes further north, until on a clear and cloudless day one is scarcely ever out of sight. ”

“ The data collected by the Juraszs are extensive (including human use of Glacier Bay) but have not yet been completely analyzed.
[3] This summary is based on information provided at the meeting by Charles and Virginia Jurasz.
Human Use of Glacier Bay [4]
John Muir popularized Glacier Bay, leading to tourist activity into the early 1900's, when loose ice resulting from earthquake activity prevented cruise vessels from operating within the Bay. Glacier Bay was designated a National Monument February 26, 1925, the area being added to April 18, 1939. ”

“ Slowly but surely, they make their way down to the sea, growing larger as other and smaller glaciers join themselves to them. There is a certain bay in Alaska which the summer visitors are sure to visit if they can possibly do so. It is called Glacier Bay, because of an immense glacier which enters it. Imagine yourself on a steamer entering this bay on a bright sunshiny day of mid-summer. Yet you shiver, for the air begins to grow colder and colder. It is no wonder, for icebergs meet your eyes on every side. ”

“ At Glacier Bay icebergs are being born all the while. Muir Glacier, the largest that dips into the bay, presents a front of 5000 feet. It is 700 feet thick, five-sevenths of it being under water. It extends back for miles and miles.
Each day the central part moves 70 feet into the sea, the discharge every twenty-four hours being 140,000,000 cubic feet of clear ice. ”

“ Within the memory of the last three generations the Muir glacier filled the bay for miles below our anchorage; and while it recedes, it is creeping slowly down, scalping the mountains, grinding all the sharp edges into powder or leaving a polished surface behind it. It gathers rock dust and the wreck of every living thing, and mixes them up with snow and ice. These congeal again, or are compressed into soft, filthy monumental masses, waiting their turn to topple into the waves at last. The wash of the sea undermines the glacier ”

“ He told them how the intrepid Scotchman, on reaching Cross Sound, had hired an ancient native guide and two or three Indians to paddle his canoe up Glacier Bay. As the mountain slopes surrounding the glacier were known to be bare of fuel, the voyagers filled their canoe with dry cedar and pine boughs, that they might have camp-fires to keep them alive in that almost Arctic atmosphere, and to cook their food. ”

“ This bay is completely landlocked, being protected on its open side by Prince Charles's Foreland, a long island lying parallel with the mainland. Down towards either horn run two ranges of schistose rocks, about 1,500 feet high, their sides almost precipitous, and the topmost ridge as sharp as a knife, and jagged as a saw; the intervening space is entirely filled up by an enormous glacier, which,—descending with one continuous incline from the head of a valley on the right, and sweeping like a torrent round the roots of an isolated clump of hills in the centre—rolls at last into the sea. ”

“ There is a native Indian cemetery adjoining Juneau, having curious little huts containing the cremated remains of the dead, with each one's personal effects.
THE GREAT MUIR GLACIER.
Passing west of Douglas Island and through Icy Strait to Glacier Bay, a magnificent view is presented. Snow-covered mountains rise six and seven thousand feet all around, and to the northwest is the imposing Mount Fairweather range, elevated over fifteen thousand feet. Glacier Bay extends forty-five miles up into the land, its width gradually contracting from twelve to three miles. ”

“ At the mouth of the bay a series of moraine islands show that the trunk glacier that occupied the bay halted here for some time and deposited this island material as a terminal moraine; that more of the bay was not filled in shows that, after lingering here, it receded comparatively fast. All the level portions of trunks of glaciers occupying ocean fiords, instead of melting back gradually in times of general shrinking and recession, as inland glaciers with sloping channels do, melt almost uniformly over all the surface until they become thin enough to float. ”

“ Alaska glaciers are all rapidly receding, this must have been a very long time ago, for a hundred years back, when the country was first visited, there was far more ice than there is now, Vancouver having been unable to enter Glacier Bay for the ice, while Icy Bay, even on modern charts, is represented as being of a V-shape from the glaciers running out on either side, whereas it now hardly deserves the name of a bay at all. ”

“ They appear, moreover, to stand wider apart from one another, and the glacier, filling the valley more deeply, becomes itself considerably wider. Nevertheless, such is the fine form of the mountains that they still appear large, especially to an eye trained in greater ranges. Being themselves magnified, they proportionally magnify the aspect of the glacial expanse, which pretends to be of quite enormous extent—a spotless desert of purest white. The views on all sides were of entrancing beauty, especially the view back down the blue vista of Kings Bay. ”

“ The glacier is a mile wide where it empties into the harbour, the ice along the front being about a hundred feet thick. As there is now very little motion to the ice, few icebergs break off, and those that do are too small to cause danger to the vessels in the anchorage. The southern corner of the bay is free of ice, and a small river discharges there from a southern valley. The glacier comes down the northwest valley, leaving its rocky wall about a mile inland; thence to the sea it is bounded by a steep ridge of glacial drift full of large boulders ”

“ Looking across the waters of the bay, whitened by thousands of floating bergs, we could see three miles of the ice-cliffs formed where the Hubbard glacier enters the sea. A dark headland on the shore of the mainland to the right shut off the full view of the glacier but formed a strongly drawn foreground, which enhanced the picturesque effect of the scenery. The Hubbard glacier flows majestically through a deep valley leading back into the mountains, and has two main branches, with a smaller and steeper tributary between. These branches unite to form a single ice-foot extending into the bay. ”

“ When the ice-period was in its prime, much of the Muir Glacier that now flows northward into Howling Valley flowed southward into Glacier Bay as a tributary of the Muir. All the rock contours show this, and so do the medial moraines. Berg Lake is crowded with bergs because they have no outlet and melt slowly. I heard none discharged. I had a hard time crossing the Divide Glacier, on which I camped. Half a mile back from the lake I gleaned a little fossil wood and made a fire on moraine boulders for tea. I slept fairly well on the sled. ”

“ At the head of Glacier Bay no less than four glaciers of great size come down to tide-level, sending off immense numbers of small fragments and bergs. The evidence here of the vast extension of these glaciers down the bay, and of the facility of glacier-ice in adjusting itself to the local topography, is of the most explicit and interesting character. The present formation of glaciers on the coast of Southwestern Alaska is favored not so much by the coolness of the climate as by the elevation of the mountains, and the excessive amount of precipitation. ”

“ The receding tide had obliged the sailors to push the boats further and further off, and when one frail bark was about full there was a crash, an avalanche of ice went splashing into the sea from the smaller glacier up the bay, and a great wave curling from it washed the boat back and left it grounded. Men without rubber boots were then so well soaked and so plastered with glacier mud that they just stepped over the boat’s side and helped the rubber-clad sailors float it off. ”

“ As the tide fell, large pieces fell from this front, and avalanches of ice-fragments crashed down into the sea and raised waves that rocked our ship and set the ice-floes grinding together. On the other point of the crescent of this bay there lay the largest glacier, an ice-field that swept down from two mountain gorges, and, spreading out in fan shape, descended in a long slope to a moraine of sand, pebbles, and boulders. Across its rolling front this glacier measured at least three miles, and the low, level moraine was one mile in width. ”

“ As our distance from the south shore of the bay increased, the mountains behind it were better seen, and proved to be a fine ridge with many peaks, the watershed between Kings and English bays. A series of glaciers descend in their hollows, but none reach the sea, for there is a broad belt of flat land all along the southern shore. The view up Kings Glacier now became of entrancing beauty as the fog cleared away, and all our peaks from Mount Nielsen round to the Diadem were disclosed. ”

“ Coming into Icy Bay, the scenery was of extraordinary grandeur, mountains many thousand feet high, the bases of which were near the water, and numerous waterfalls and glaciers. Some of us sat up nearly all night to see the [54] wonders, the like of which cannot be seen anywhere in the world, except, perhaps, in Greenland. After midnight the moon came up in all her glory, and the northern lights played fantastic tricks in the sky. The great glacier in this bay is a wonder, a mile wide and several hundred feet high, the ice falling off every few minutes in great masses. ”

“ Everybody sits up to see the midnight sky. At this time of the year there is no night here, though the sun drops a degree or two below the horizon. One may read at twelve o'clock San Francisco time.
June 23. Early this morning we arrived in Glacier Bay. We passed through crowds of bergs at the mouth of the bay, though, owing to wind and tide, there were but few at the front of Muir Glacier. A fine, bright day, the last of a group of a week or two, as shown by the dryness of the sand along the shore and on the moraine--rare weather hereabouts. ”