Travels in Alaska | Page 4

all the waves that have broken over them since first they
came to light toward the close of the glacial period. The shores also of
the harbor are strikingly grooved and scratched and in every way as
glacial in all their characteristics as those of new-born glacial lakes.
That the domain of the sea is being slowly extended over the land by
incessant wave-action is well known; but in this freshly glaciated
region the shores have been so short a time exposed to wave-action that
they are scarcely at all wasted. The extension of the sea affected by its
own action in post-glacial times is probably less than the millionth part
of that affected by glacial action during the last glacier period. The
direction of the flow of the ice-sheet to which all the main features of
this wonderful region are due was in general southward.
From this quiet little English town I made many short excursions--up
the coast to Nanaimo, to Burrard Inlet, now the terminus of the
Canadian Pacific Railroad, to Puget Sound, up Fraser River to New
Westminster and Yale at the head of navigation, charmed everywhere
with the wild, new-born scenery. The most interesting of these and the
most difficult to leave was the Puget Sound region, famous the world
over for the wonderful forests of gigantic trees about its shores. It is an
arm and many-fingered hand of the sea, reaching southward from the
Straits of Juan de Fuca about a hundred miles into the heart of one of
the noblest coniferous forests on the face of the globe. All its scenery is
wonderful--broad river-like reaches sweeping in beautiful curves
around bays and capes and jutting promontories, opening here and there
into smooth, blue, lake-like expanses dotted with islands and feathered
with tall, spiry evergreens, their beauty doubled on the bright
mirror-water.

Sailing from Victoria, the Olympic Mountains are seen right ahead,
rising in bold relief against the sky, with jagged crests and peaks from
six to eight thousand feet high,--small residual glaciers and ragged
snow-fields beneath them in wide amphitheatres opening down through
the forest-filled valleys. These valleys mark the courses of the Olympic
glaciers at the period of their greatest extension, when they poured their
tribute into that portion of the great northern ice-sheet that overswept
Vancouver Island and filled the strait between it and the mainland.
On the way up to Olympia, then a hopeful little town situated at the end
of one of the longest fingers of the Sound, one is often reminded of
Lake Tahoe, the scenery of the widest expanses is so lake-like in the
clearness and stillness of the water and the luxuriance of the
surrounding forests. Doubling cape after cape, passing uncounted
islands, new combinations break on the view in endless variety,
sufficient to satisfy the lover of wild beauty through a whole life. When
the clouds come down, blotting out everything, one feels as if at sea;
again lifting a little, some islet may be seen standing alone with the
tops of its trees dipping out of sight in gray misty fringes; then the
ranks of spruce and cedar bounding the water's edge come to view; and
when at length the whole sky is clear the colossal cone of Mt. Rainier
may be seen in spotless white, looking down over the dark woods from
a distance of fifty or sixty miles, but so high and massive and so
sharply outlined, it seems to be just back of a strip of woods only a few
miles wide.
Mt. Rainier, or Tahoma (the Indian name), is the noblest of the
volcanic cones extending from Lassen Butte and Mt. Shasta along the
Cascade Range to Mt. Baker. One of the most telling views of it
hereabouts is obtained near Tacoma. From a bluff back of the town it
was revealed in all its glory, laden with glaciers and snow down to the
forested foothills around its finely curved base. Up to this time (1879)
it had been ascended but once. From observations made on the summit
with a single aneroid barometer, it was estimated to be about 14,500
feet high. Mt. Baker, to the northward, is about 10,700 feet high, a
noble mountain. So also are Mt. Adams, Mt. St. Helens, and Mt. Hood.
The latter, overlooking the town of Portland, is perhaps the best known.

Rainier, about the same height as Shasta, surpasses them all in massive
icy grandeur,--the most majestic solitary mountain I had ever yet
beheld. How eagerly I gazed and longed to climb it and study its
history only the mountaineer may know, but I was compelled to turn
away and bide my time.
The species forming the bulk of the woods here is the Douglas spruce
(Pseudotsuga douglasii), one of the greatest of the western giants.