| Summary: | Alaska's Purple Glacier. Alaska's Purple Glacier ALASKA is unique in the infinite variety of its natural wonders. I had no sooner become inured to its volcanic marvels than it put forth something in the way of ice phenomena which made me doubt the evidence of my own senses. This happened when I took my party into the hitherto unexplored northern border of Katmai Monument, which country Aleut tradition peoples with giants. We encountered no giants, of course, though the grizzlies were a bit too plentiful. But the climax of the trip was when I looked through my field glasses and saw a weird ghostly mass filling a V-shaped valley between mountains. It mystified all of us until we drew near enough to see that it was a glacier. But such a glacier! From high peaks it came winding down fifteen miles to a gravel moraine where it ended in an ice cliff two hundred feet high and a mile across. Instead of the alabaster purity we expect of glaciers, this one carried on its back the heavy blanket of gray and purple ash that had buried it during the eruption of Katmai, some two decades ago. In the course of its slow march down the valley it had heaved and split open until its somber covering was pierced by innumerable crystal spikes and serrated ridges of pure sapphire. In the middle of the frontal wall was hollowed a cavern so large that four trains might easily have entered it abreast. It was, perhaps, one hundred and fifty feet wide and eighty feet high—an arc of scintillating azure that deepened to purple as it penetrated toward the heart of the glacier. Out of the cavern sprang a roaring, silt-white river, with blocks of ice, blue as forget-me-nots, dancing on its turbulent surface. This, the strangest glacier I have ever seen, does not appear on any Alaskan A widespread misbelief, even in the North, is that a glacier is frozen water. It isn't. The crystal masses that topple from the face of a tidewater glacier are really snowflakes which fell centuries ago many miles back among the mountain peaks. Up in chose catchment basins thousands of feet above sea level, they melted and froze during the days and nights of countless seasons, until, welded by the pressure of their own weight, they became solid ice—a frigid sheet from five hundred to one thousand feet deep. Brittle and inelastic as ice looks, it actually flows like water. It moves down from its cloud-wrapped basin invisibly slow—literally a movement of the ages. Yet it comes in eddies, rapids, wild cascades, depending on the angle of the channel beneath. And like a river, it seeks the sea, swinging to avoid obstructions, or damming up against them until, by the very force of its own bulk, it flows on either side, to join again lower down. It comes grinding, gouging out its own channel through the living rock. Here again one lives in the morning of creation, for the eye beholds this mighty chisel of Nature fashioning hills and valleys that shall become green under the sunlight of a future that is centuries away. In Alaska today more than five thousand of these remnants of the last Ice Age are slowly molding the landscape of tomorrow. About twenty-five of them are dropping icebergs into tidewaters that never freeze. And, strange to say, the real glacier area of the territory lies along the southeastern coast, where the vegetation is almost tropical in its luxuriance, and the climate is very much milder than that of New York. On the farthest shores of the Arctic, and in the great Yukon Basin, where temperatures are lower, there are no glaciers. There never have been any, authorities maintain, even during the last Ice Age.—From "Alaskans All," by Barrett Willoughby. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin.)
|
|---|