My experiments with volcanoesJaggar, Thomas Augustus
Science
My experiments with volcanoes
Jaggar, Thomas Augustus
Geologists -- Biography; Volcanoes
At Volcano Bay we landed for a bear hunt, which was very exciting for
me. When we found bear tracks in an amphitheater under big mountains,
we climbed toward the divide at the head; but we could find no pass
over it. From the high ground we looked across the river at clumps of
alders. John borrowed my field glass, handed it back, and pointed out
a black spot far away under the bushes. “I just saw it move,” he said,
“that spot is a big brown bear where he has been holed up.”
I remained watching while John and Pete, with their 25-caliber Savage
carbines, crept across the valley bottom, keeping down the wind from
the bear in the shelter of bushes. I saw that they were getting very
close to the game, lost sight of them for a few minutes, then heard two
sharp cracks and saw the bear in violent motion, thrashing around and
tearing up the ground, then quickly subsiding. I made my way across the
valley and found they had neatly shot a year old Alaskan brown bear.
The rest of the day was given to skinning it, and we sank the skull,
tied to a fish line from the sloop, to the bottom of the bay where
marine organisms would eat away remaining flesh and leave the bone
clean.
Next we sailed up to the head of Pavlof Bay and camped at a barabara,
or sod hut, preparatory to a trek to a small volcano that lies near a
shallow lake on the north side of the magnificent pair of snowy volcano
cones known as Pavlof and Pavlof Sister. We were early in the season
and could see a glacier extending down from Pavlof Crater, which is a
cup containing a conelet at the side of the summit. The crater is like
a collar, the conelet like the knot of a necktie, while the glacier
is the ribbon of the necktie, itself, extending down to a jumble of
snowy hills with rocky moraines at the edge of the lake. We made camp
and ran into some adverse weather, and also into a party of mainland
sportsmen. We gave up further hunting and returned to King Cove, for
John had his bear and that was enough. The curved beauty of the Pavlof
cones, with a sweep of lava flows to the west of them, heavily mantled
with snow, was exquisite and a knowledge of the cones was useful when
plans were made for a later expedition.
Mrs. Jaggar, after a trip by way of the Yukon into the interior of
Alaska waited for me at Kodiak while I took Captain Johanssen’s SS
_Starr_ to Unalaska where I saw my friends of the Coast Guard and
received an invitation to go later on the _Unalga_ to Attu. I
stayed on the _Starr_ to Bristol Bay on the Bering Sea side, in
order to see the Alaskan Peninsula from the north.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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