Our Country; West (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: The Loneliest Place in the United States. My party of five white men and some Yakutat Indians had landed, through the heavy surf of the great Pacific Ocean, in an open bight called Icy Bay on the Alaskan coast just off the snow-clad peak of Mount St. EHas, the highest mountain in North America. Here we left one man to look after our many supplies, for numerous bear tracks, most of them of the huge grizzly, showed us that we could not safely leave the supplies unguarded. Then we started toward the great mountain. It was our main object to make explorations in the range of which St. EHas is the culminating peak, where it was known that no white men had ever been before, and where all observations of the range had been from ships coasting by. For some eight to ten miles the land was very flat, but for the most part covered with a dense growth of spruce and firs, and cut up by many small streams of the coldest ice-water from the great mountain's side and its glaciers. This course brought us to a high ridge, some four hundred to five hundred feet from foot to crest, that looked not unlike the parapet of a fortification for giants, and much like the unbroken front of a rolling bluff facing the valley of a river. It was covered with earth, stones, and a growth of underbrush that made the casual observer suppose he was looking at an ordinary ridge of land. But here and there a shining space of black, like a huge facet of polished jet or black glass, coupled with the proximity to the huge mountain covered with ice, plainly told the experienced observer that he was facing the front of a colossal glacier, or river of ice, and this rubbish was only the dirt, stones and soil it was shoving before it as it crept slowly toward the sea, or sought a lower level. Once at the top ...