An Expedition to Mount St. Elias, AlaskaRussell, Israel C. (Cook)
History
An Expedition to Mount St. Elias, Alaska
Russell, Israel C. (Cook)
Alaska -- Description and travel; Saint Elias, Mount (Alaska and Yukon)
A description of the St. Elias region in the Pacific Coast Pilot
supplements the paper in the coast survey report for 1875. This is an
exhaustive compilation from all available sources of information
interesting to navigators. It contains, besides, a valuable summary of
what was known at the time of its publication concerning the history
and physical features of the country to which it relates. In this
publication the true character of the Malaspina glacier was first
recorded and its name proposed. The description is as follows:
"At Point Manby and eastward to the Kwik river the shore was bordered
by trees, apparently willows and alders, with a somewhat denser belt a
little farther back. Behind this rises a bluff or bank of high land,
as described by various navigators. About the vicinity of Tebienkoff's
Nearer Point the trees cease, but begin again near the river. The
bluff or table-land behind rises higher than the river valley and
completely hides it from the southward, and is in summer bare of
vegetation (except a few rare patches on its face) and apparently is
composed of glacial débris, much of which is of a reddish color. In
May, 1874, when observed by the U. S. Coast Survey party of that year,
the extensive flattened top of this table-land or plateau was covered
with a smooth and even sheet of pure white snow. In the latter part of
June, 1880, however, this snow had melted, and for the first time the
real and most extraordinary character of this plateau was revealed.
Within the beach and extending in a northwesterly direction to the
valley behind it, at the foot of the St. Elias Alps an undetermined
distance, this plateau, or a large part of it, is one great field of
buried ice. Almost everywhere nothing is visible but bowlders, dirt
and gravel; but at the time mentioned, back of the bight between Point
Manby and Nearer Point, for a space of several square miles the
coverlid of dirt had fallen in, owing to the melting of the ice
beneath, and revealed a surface of broken pinnacles of ice, each
crowned by a patch of dirt, standing close to one another like a
forest of prisms, these decreasing in height from the summit of the
plateau gradually in a sort of semicircular sweep toward the beach,
near which, however, the dirt and débris again predominate, forming a
sort of terminal moraine to this immense, buried, immovable glacier,
for it is nothing else. Trains of large bowlders were visible here and
there, and the general trend of the glacier seemed to be northwest and
southeast.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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