West of the Copper River mighty masses of the Choogatch Mountains rise directly from the sea without any intervening lowland, save at three tiny points upon which savage man has hastened to fix his abode. Many crests to this range on the north side of Prince William’s Sound must have a mean elevation of over ten thousand feet, densely wooded with semper-virent coniferous forests up to a height of one thousand feet above sea-level, and covered with everlasting snowy blankets to within three or four thousand feet of the ocean at their bases. The body of Prince William’s Sound is so forbidding in its dark grandeur that even the stolid Russians never tired of narrating its stirring impression upon their senses. Although the interior of this gulf is completely land-locked, being sheltered from the south by the islands of Noochek and Montague, yet it is by no means a safe or pleasant sheet of water to navigate, inasmuch as furious gales and “woollies” sweep down upon it from the steep mountain sides and cañons, so that, without even a moment’s warning, the traveller’s craft is suddenly stricken, and compelled to instantly run for shelter under the lee of some one of the hundreds of islands and capes which stud its waters or point its coast. Immense glaciers are descending from the cavernous inlets of the northern and eastern shores, and shedded fragments of ice, large and small, are cemented by the tide into large sheets, which are finally swept out and lost in the ocean. [Illustration: VALDES GLACIER View at the head of Valdes Inlet, Prince William’s Sound: typical study of hundreds of such gelid rivers which discharge into the waters of this gloomy sound. A September sketch, made at low-tide]