Sixth Letter. — The Great Llewellyn or Taku Glacier
Caribou Crossing, September 4, 1903.
We have just come in on the steamboat from Atlin, and are waiting for the train which will take us to White Horse this afternoon, where we will take a river boat to Dawson.
Day before yesterday we took the little steamboat that plies across Atlin Lake, having chartered it with Sutton, and having asked a Mr. Knight, of Philadelphia, and Captain Irving, of Victoria, making a party of five, and went to the head of the lake—forty-five miles. A lovely sail. Up the narrow mountain-locked channel on the west of Goat Island (named from the many wild goats on it). The water a clear, deep blue and light green, according to its depth. The mountains chiefly granite, rising sheer up on either hand four and five thousand feet; the fir forest, dense and sombre, clothing their bases, then running out to ground pine and low shrubs, then the grass and mosses, then the bare rocks and jagged crags and the everlasting snows. The lake channel is everywhere narrow, sometimes widening out to five or six miles, then narrowing into a mile or two, but the air is so wonderfully translucent that ten miles look like one, and distant shores seem close at hand. The further we sailed the narrower grew the channel, until we were among islands and cañons, with sheer snow-capped heights hanging above us, at last slowly creeping through a tortuous passageway of still water out into a long, silent arm, at whose head we tied up to the forest for the night. These clear waters are filled with trout and grayling—the latter chiefly, but of birds there were almost none. Only a belated and startled great blue heron flapped lazily away to the west. Using our glasses, we saw two or three wild goats up on the heights above us, and probably many more saw us far down below.
In the morning we breakfasted early, and started for the glacier—the great Llewellen or Taku glacier, said to be the largest in the British possessions of North America, sixty miles long to where it comes to Taku Bay, near Juneau, and is there known as Taku glacier. We clambered over a mile of trail, through dense, close-growing fir, then out into a wide plain of detritus, once covered by the ice, now two miles long by a mile wide. Difficult walking, all glacial drift, and boulders great and small. The distance to the vast slope of dirty ice seemed only a little way; nothing but the walk would convince one that it was over two miles. The glacier projects in a great bow. On its center, like a hog-back mane, are piled masses of earth and rocks. It is there that the moving ice river is. On either side the ice is almost still and white. For five or ten miles the glacier rises toward an apparent summit and stretches toward the coast, fed by a multitude of lesser ice streams issuing from every mountain gorge and valley, while monstrous masses of rock, granite and porphyry, tower into the snows and clouds above it. We had some difficulty in climbing upon the glacier. Chasms opened on either side, the front was a cracking ice cliff, crevasses yawned everywhere. Though the surface was dirty and blackened, yet down in the cracks and crevasses the wonderful blue ice appeared. From the base of the glacier flows a river, and over its surface coursed a thousand rills.
We walked upon the ice and lingered near it till about noon, when our boat took us back to Atlin through the greater lake, along the east shores of Goat Island, a four hours’ sail.
From Atlin we have returned as we went, and are now spending a few hours here. There were very few birds on Atlin Lake, though I saw a superb loon yesterday near the western shore.
Ice formed on the lake last night. Snow is in the air. We may be too late to go down the Yukon from Dawson.