Alaska Notes Summer of 1890, 1890 [1895; 1912?], Image 13

• Main Author: Muir, John
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: Scholarly Commons 2019
• Subjects: Archipelago; glacier; glaciers; Alaska
• Online Access: https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/jmn-a2/13; https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/context/jmn-a2/article/1012/type/native/viewcontent/MuirReel33_Notebook02_Img013.jpg

20 the fine striated polish. Not even to the extent of the thickness of a sheet of writing paper have these wave lapped rocks been denuded in all the centuries since the ice mantle was [glaciers were] melted & they first were exposed to the light of day. Even in the streets of the town resisting galciated bosses are exposed whose [fine] scoring & striation have not been effaced by the wear of travel over them. & in the orchards fruitful boughs shade the edges of glacier pavements & drop apples & peaches upon them [unwasted rocks [glacier pavements] whose smooth surfaces advertise the tremendous action of downgrinding glaciers in characters that must be plain to the dullest observer]. Nowhere else as far as I have seen are the beneficent sculpturing soil-making action of [benevolent influences of the] glaciers [period] made manifest in plainer terms & brought forward in more striking & close contrast with the action of man [than here]. Yesterday a landscape of ice bloodless lifeless. No strait of Georgia or Fuca, no trace of Puget Sound, No Vancouver Island in existence or any other of all the multitude of islands of [all] the Archipelago all these features unborn as yet, smothered in an all-embracing mantle of crawling in. Today towns apple farms & wheat & people forests – green meadows & exuberance of [warm] life. All the scenery all the (beauty & the) life newborn. No tale of fairy is so marvelous or so exciting to the imagination as the plain story of the 21 works & ways of snow flowers banded together as glaciers & marching forth from their encampments on the mountains to develop the buried beauty of landscapes, make fields of soil for food for man & beast & for gardens, make basins for lakes, channels for the streams, bays & sounds & embroidery of inland channels for the margin of the seas & the continents, fashion the comparatively featureless shores to countless islands etc etc etc Then their appointed work done in the fullness of ...