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)
Our way at first led up the eastern border of the Marvine glacier,
over seemingly interminable fields of angular débris. Traveling on the
rugged moraine, some idea of which may be obtained from plate 17, was
not only tiresome in the extreme, but ruinous to boots and shoes. On
passing the mouth of the {123} first lateral gorge (about a mile from
Blossom island), from which flows a secondary glacier, we could look
up the bed of the steep ravine to the white precipices beyond, which
seemed to descend out of the clouds, and were scarred by avalanches;
but all of the higher peaks were shrouded from view. At noon we passed
the mouth of a second and larger gorge, which discharges an important
tributary. We then left the border of the glacier and traveled up its
center, the crevasses at the embouchures of the tributary stream being
too numerous and too wide to be crossed without great difficulty.
[Illustration: PLATE 17. MORAINES ON THE MARVINE GLACIER.]
In the center of the Marvine glacier there is a dark medial moraine,
composed mainly of débris of gabbro and serpentine, of the same
character as the medial moraine on the Hayden glacier, already briefly
mentioned. Here, too, we found broad areas covered with sand cones and
glacial tables. There are also rushing streams, flowing in channels of
ice, which finally plunge into crevasses or in well-like moulins and
send back a deep roar from the caverns beneath. The murmurs of running
waters, heard on every hand, seem to indicate that the whole glacier
is doomed to melt away in a single season.
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