Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, December 1898: Volume LIV, No. 2, December 1898Various
Science
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, December 1898: Volume LIV, No. 2, December 1898
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
From Essington to Hazelton is one hundred and fifty-two miles, a
panorama of unending and unbroken beauty; never monotonous, always
interesting, it presents a river voyage which is probably not
equaled, certainly not excelled, by any other river voyage of the
same length on the American continent or in the world. We began
the voyage on Sunday morning, we tied up in front of Hazelton on
Saturday night. To recount in detail the haps and mishaps of each
day's progress would take more time than I can command. In one day
we made forty-eight miles, on another day we made one hundred yards,
on another day we didn't make a foot. With plenty of water under her
keel the Caledonia could run twenty miles an hour; she could cut her
way through a sand bar at the rate of a yard or so an hour; and at
either rate of progress she burned each hour from one and a half to
two cords of wood.
For the first ten miles the scenery does not differ materially from
that which we are accustomed to in the inland sea from Victoria
to Alaska. Then we enter fresh water and for the next forty miles
steam through one long mountain gorge, for here the river has cut
completely through the Cascade Range. The mountains begin at the
water's edge and rise almost perpendicularly to heights of from three
to four thousand feet. Their lower limits are covered with dense
green forests, which seem to grow out of the solid rock. The summits
are smooth and glistening, and often covered with snow and ice. Here
and there we can trace some tiny rivulet issuing from an ice bed high
up among the clouds, and every portion of its course can be traced
down the steep mountain wall until it gives one final and headlong
plunge into the river. At times these streams, taking their rise in
some extensive glacier, are of considerable magnitude, and fairly
roar as they leap and hurl themselves downward from their dizzy
height. And here we learned a curious fact about the river: in summer
it falls when it rains, and rises when the sun shines, so rapidly
do the pent-up snows of winter disappear and rush down the mountain
sides under the heat of the spring sun.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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