July-August 1879, Alaska Trip Image 46

• Main Author: Muir, John
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: Scholarly Commons 1879
• Subjects: John Muir; journals; drawings; writings; travel; journaling; naturalist; Great Glacier; glacier; glaciers; Alaska
• Online Access: https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/jmj-all/1426; https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/context/jmj-all/article/2425/type/native/viewcontent/fullsize.jpg

These are the most striking and attractive of the features. Small glaciers mostly buried in snow and seeming far smaller than they really are, attract but little attention from the ordinary observer; they are simply regarded as snow banks, remnants of the general mantle of winter. But a great glacier, river-like, curving right and left around projecting bosses, sweeping past lofty rock walls and down thru’ the forests streaked with trains of sand and angular boulders that are relieved against the gray and blue of the ice and mark its flow, such glaciers always fix the eye and call out the wondering attention of every beholder. Counting big and little, about one hundred came into view, the smallest perhaps a mile long, the largest 15 or 20. The snout of this one comes down to tide water in a beautiful Yosemite valley. It reaches across from wall to wall with a front of a mile or so and a height of five or six hundred feet. It is as if taking the scenery into consideration, gables, battlements, huge outswelling bosses tree-crowned and guarded, {sketch} https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/jmj-all/2425/thumbnail.jpg