October-December 1879, First Alaska Trip with S. Hall Young Image 20

• Main Author: Muir, John
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: Scholarly Commons 1879
• Subjects: John Muir; journals; drawings; writings; travel; journaling; naturalist; Arctic; glaciers; Alaska
• Online Access: https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/jmj-all/1621; https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/context/jmj-all/article/2620/type/native/viewcontent/fullsize.jpg

reach of the drifting bergs, which were now crowded back in a dense pack against the snout of the gl[acier] but which would crowd against this shore should the wind change round to the N.W. While camp affairs were being attended to I strolled off to seek high ground for a view back over the gl[acier]s, climbed a steep granite mountainside to a point about a thousand ft. above the bay. It is heavily glaciated and loaded with shifting slushy moraine detritus about the bases. The rain ceased. The clouds lifted slowly, lingering in mighty wing masses about the glorious mountains that rose out of a broad ice sea. The whitest of all white mountains, the grandest of all existing glaciers I had ever yet seen. Here I sat and sketched, while the sunlight streamed through the black storm-clouds with their satiny fringes on the intensely white waving outspreading expanse of ice and the glittering multitude of bergs and the spiry fronts of the gl[acier]s, and the dark green water of the bay and the ineffably chaste heights of the mountain clusters making the wildest and most sublime picture of Arctic beauty conceivable. For a time I could only gaze awe-stricken and enchanted and yet in the midst of it all, while the bergs one after another broke off from the ice-cliffs with loud thunder roaring, making stormy swells in the water and compelling all the other bergs to grate and clash in wild welcome. The storm-clouds wreathed the immaculate mountain fountains and the sun lit the icy prairie into a most spiritual glow, and the heads of domes and mountain islands were beginning to come to the light to take their places in landscapes about to be. It seemed as if I had seen it all before, so long had my life been bent on and been absorbed in ice studies in looking at unseen gl[acier] landscapes of Cal., through the traces of written history of just such scenes as this. Looking southward or a little to the W of the south there is a wide mer de glace with the mountains rising in the midst of its almost level surface like islands, ...