Seeing America First, with the Berry BrothersColby, Eleanor
History
Seeing America First, with the Berry Brothers
Colby, Eleanor
Canada -- Description and travel -- Juvenile literature; United States -- Description and travel -- Juvenile literature
We climbed up one of the glaciers and it surely was "some climb."
Everyone in the party used an alpine stock and it gave us fellows a
kind of shaky feeling in our knees when we could look down a wall of
ice a thousand feet deep into a great crevasse or crack. We were glad
to stand pretty close to the guide who was big and strong and who knows
these glaciers as we boys know the streets of Detroit. We never knew
before that ice can flow like water only much more slowly. The center
of a glacier moves down the mountain about 16 inches a day. There
are tiny little insects living in this ice. We saw them through the
microscope and they were hopping around as though their feet were cold.
There are wee pink plants growing in the ice in some places and they
make the ice look rose colored. They are so small that you cannot see
them without a microscope.
Rainier Park is one of the famous wild flower gardens of the world.
Blooming at the very edge of the snow fields are miles and miles of
wonderful flowers. There are daisies, columbine, larkspur, and many
others and they are much taller and finer than those in common gardens.
Grown-ups tell us boys that if we associate with great people we shall
grow to be like them, and perhaps these flowers grow so big and tall
from living so near Mount Rainier and the great cedars and firs. We do
not wonder that this part of the park is called "Paradise Valley."
[Illustration:
Filling Cans by Machinery
Salmon Wheel
Warehouse full of Salmon
_Salmon Spawning_
COLUMBIA RIVER SALMON INDUSTRY
Cooking Retort]
Fishing here on the Columbia River is not just a sport. It is a
business which brings in millions of dollars a year. There are single
factories where a half a million cans of salmon are put up in one day,
and over a hundred million dollars worth of salmon have been taken from
the Columbia river since the white man first came here.
The large salmon are called chinook, and one of these fish weighing
eighty pounds is not an unknown thing, though their average weight
is about twenty pounds. There are many small kinds of salmon, so the
chinook is called "the King of Salmon."
The baby fish are hatched way up in the mountain streams and as they
grow friskier and larger, they swim down the stream into the Columbia
river and on to the ocean where they stay about four years till they
are quite grown up. Then they get homesick for the scenes of their
childhood, and, choosing their mates, they start back to a sort of
"home-coming." It takes a long time, for the current is strong, but if
they are lucky enough to miss getting caught and canned, they arrive at
the "spawning place" after several months, and lay their eggs, and soon
their little fish children are starting out to see the world as their
parents did before them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account