Travels in Alaska | Page 6

icy chain of
coast mountains from Puget Sound to Cook Inlet; and, with infinite
variety, the general pattern is harmonious throughout its whole extent
of nearly a thousand miles. Here you glide into a narrow channel
hemmed in by mountain walls, forested down to the water's edge,
where there is no distant view, and your attention is concentrated on the
objects close about you--the crowded spires of the spruces and
hemlocks rising higher and higher on the steep green slopes; stripes of
paler green where winter avalanches have cleared away the trees,
allowing grasses and willows to spring up; zigzags of cascades
appearing and disappearing among the bushes and trees; short, steep
glens with brawling streams hidden beneath alder and dogwood, seen
only where they emerge on the brown algae of the shore; and retreating
hollows, with lingering snow-banks marking the fountains of ancient
glaciers. The steamer is often so near the shore that you may distinctly
see the cones clustered on the tops of the trees, and the ferns and bushes
at their feet.
But new scenes are brought to view with magical rapidity. Rounding
some bossy cape, the eye is called away into far-reaching vistas,
bounded on either hand by headlands in charming array, one dipping
gracefully beyond another and growing fainter and more ethereal in the
distance. The tranquil channel stretching river-like between, may be
stirred here and there by the silvery plashing of upspringing salmon, or

by flocks of white gulls floating like water-lilies among the sun
spangles; while mellow, tempered sunshine is streaming over all,
blending sky, land, and water in pale, misty blue. Then, while you are
dreamily gazing into the depths of this leafy ocean lane, the little
steamer, seeming hardly larger than a duck, turning into some passage
not visible until the moment of entering it, glides into a wide
expanse--a sound filled with islands, sprinkled and clustered in forms
and compositions such as nature alone can invent; some of them so
small the trees growing on them seem like single handfuls culled from
the neighboring woods and set in the water to keep them fresh, while
here and there at wide intervals you may notice bare rocks just above
the water, mere dots punctuating grand, outswelling sentences of
islands.
The variety we find, both as to the contours and the collocation of the
islands, is due chiefly to differences in the structure and composition of
their rocks, and the unequal glacial denudation different portions of the
coast were subjected to. This influence must have been especially
heavy toward the end of the glacial period, when the main ice-sheet
began to break up into separate glaciers. Moreover, the mountains of
the larger islands nourished local glaciers, some of them of
considerable size, which sculptured their summits and sides, forming in
some cases wide cirques with canyons or valleys leading down from
them into the channels and sounds. These causes have produced much
of the bewildering variety of which nature is so fond, but none the less
will the studious observer see the underlying harmony--the general
trend of the islands in the direction of the flow of the main ice-mantle
from the mountains of the Coast Range, more or less varied by
subordinate foothill ridges and mountains. Furthermore, all the islands,
great and small, as well as the headlands and promontories of the
mainland, are seen to have a rounded, over-rubbed appearance
produced by the over-sweeping ice-flood during the period of greatest
glacial abundance.
The canals, channels, straits, passages, sounds, etc., are subordinate to
the same glacial conditions in their forms, trends, and extent as those
which determined the forms, trends, and distribution of the land-masses,

their basins being the parts of the pre-glacial margin of the continent,
eroded to varying depths below sea-level, and into which, of course, the
ocean waters flowed as the ice was melted out of them. Had the general
glacial denudation been much less, these ocean ways over which we are
sailing would have been valleys and canyons and lakes; and the islands
rounded hills and ridges, landscapes with undulating features like those
found above sea-level wherever the rocks and glacial conditions are
similar. In general, the island-bound channels are like rivers, not only
in separate reaches as seen from the deck of a vessel, but continuously
so for hundreds of miles in the case of the longest of them. The
tide-currents, the fresh driftwood, the inflowing streams, and the
luxuriant foliage of the out-leaning trees on the shores make this
resemblance all the more complete. The largest islands look like part of
the mainland in any view to be had of them from the ship, but far the
greater number are small, and appreciable as islands, scores of them
being less than a mile long. These the eye easily