Chapter II
Alexander Archipelago and the Home I found in Alaska
To the lover of pure wildness Alaska is one of the most wonderful
countries in the world. No excursion that I know of may be made into
any other American wilderness where so marvelous an abundance of noble,
newborn scenery is so charmingly brought to view as on the trip through
the Alexander Archipelago to Fort Wrangell and Sitka. Gazing from the
deck of the steamer, one is borne smoothly over calm blue waters,
through the midst of countless forest-clad islands. The ordinary
discomforts of a sea voyage are not felt, for nearly all the whole long
way is on inland waters that are about as waveless as rivers and lakes.
So numerous are the islands that they seem to have been sown broadcast;
long tapering vistas between the largest of them open in every
direction.
Day after day in the fine weather we enjoyed, we seemed to float in
true fairyland, each succeeding view seeming more and more beautiful,
the one we chanced to have before us the most surprisingly beautiful of
all. Never before this had I been embosomed in scenery so hopelessly
beyond description. To sketch picturesque bits, definitely bounded, is
comparatively easy—a lake in the woods, a glacier meadow, or a cascade
in its dell; or even a grand master view of mountains beheld from some
commanding outlook after climbing from height to height above the
forests. These may be attempted, and more or less telling pictures made
of them; but in these coast landscapes there is such indefinite,
on-leading expansiveness, such a multitude of features without apparent
redundance, their lines graduating delicately into one another in
endless succession, while the whole is so fine, so tender, so ethereal,
that all pen-work seems hopelessly unavailing. Tracing shining ways
through fiord and sound, past forests and waterfalls, islands and
mountains and far azure headlands, it seems as if surely we must at
length reach the very paradise of the poets, the abode of the blessed.
[Illustration: Hanging Valley and Waterfall, Fraser Ranch.]
Some idea of the wealth of this scenery may be gained from the fact
that the coast-line of Alaska is about twenty-six thousand miles long,
more than twice as long as all the rest of the United States. The
islands of the Alexander Archipelago, with the straits, channels,
canals, sounds, passages, and fiords, form an intricate web of land and
water embroidery sixty or seventy miles wide, fringing the lofty icy
chain of coast mountains from Puget Sound to Cook Inlet; and, with
infinite variety, the general pattern is harmonious throughout its
whole extent of nearly a thousand miles. Here you glide into a narrow
channel hemmed in by mountain walls, forested down to the water’s edge,
where there is no distant view, and your attention is concentrated on
the objects close about you—the crowded spires of the spruces and
hemlocks rising higher and higher on the steep green slopes; stripes of
paler green where winter avalanches have cleared away the trees,
allowing grasses and willows to spring up; zigzags of cascades
appearing and disappearing among the bushes and trees; short, steep
glens with brawling streams hidden beneath alder and dogwood, seen only
where they emerge on the brown algæ of the shore; and retreating
hollows, with lingering snow-banks marking the fountains of ancient
glaciers. The steamer is often so near the shore that you may
distinctly see the cones clustered on the tops of the trees, and the
ferns and bushes at their feet.
But new scenes are brought to view with magical rapidity. Rounding some
bossy cape, the eye is called away into far-reaching vistas, bounded on
either hand by headlands in charming array, one dipping gracefully
beyond another and growing fainter and more ethereal in the distance.
The tranquil channel stretching river-like between, may be stirred here
and there by the silvery plashing of upspringing salmon, or by flocks
of white gulls floating like water-lilies among the sun spangles; while
mellow, tempered sunshine is streaming over all, blending sky, land,
and water in pale, misty blue. Then, while you are dreamily gazing into
the depths of this leafy ocean lane, the little steamer, seeming hardly
larger than a duck, turning into some passage not visible until the
moment of entering it, glides into a wide expanse—a sound filled with
islands, sprinkled and clustered in forms and compositions such as
nature alone can invent; some of them so small the trees growing on
them seem like single handfuls culled from the neighboring woods and
set in the water to keep them fresh, while here and there at wide
intervals you may notice bare rocks just above the water, mere dots
punctuating grand, outswelling sentences of islands.
The variety we find, both as to the contours and the collocation of the
islands, is due chiefly to differences in the structure and composition
of their rocks, and the unequal glacial denudation different portions
of the coast were subjected to. This influence must have been
especially heavy toward the end of the glacial period, when the main
ice-sheet began to break up into separate glaciers. Moreover, the
mountains of the larger islands nourished local glaciers, some of them
of considerable size, which sculptured their summits and sides, forming
in some cases wide cirques with cañons or valleys leading down from
them into the channels and sounds. These causes have produced much of
the bewildering variety of which nature is so fond, but none the less
will the studious observer see the underlying harmony—the general trend
of the islands in the direction of the flow of the main ice-mantle from
the mountains of the Coast Range, more or less varied by subordinate
foothill ridges and mountains. Furthermore, all the islands, great and
small, as well as the headlands and promontories of the mainland, are
seen to have a rounded, over-rubbed appearance produced by the
over-sweeping ice-flood during the period of greatest glacial
abundance.
The canals, channels, straits, passages, sounds, etc., are subordinate
to the same glacial conditions in their forms, trends, and extent as
those which determined the forms, trends, and distribution of the
land-masses, their basins being the parts of the pre-glacial margin of
the continent, eroded to varying depths below sea-level, and into
which, of course, the ocean waters flowed as the ice was melted out of
them. Had the general glacial denudation been much less, these ocean
ways over which we are sailing would have been valleys and cañons and
lakes; and the islands rounded hills and ridges, landscapes with
undulating features like those found above sea-level wherever the rocks
and glacial conditions are similar. In general, the island-bound
channels are like rivers, not only in separate reaches as seen from the
deck of a vessel, but continuously so for hundreds of miles in the case
of the longest of them. The tide-currents, the fresh driftwood, the
inflowing streams, and the luxuriant foliage of the out-leaning trees
on the shores make this resemblance all the more complete. The largest
islands look like part of the mainland in any view to be had of them
from the ship, but far the greater number are small, and appreciable as
islands, scores of them being less than a mile long. These the eye
easily takes in and revels in their beauty with ever fresh delight. In
their relations to each other the individual members of a group have
evidently been derived from the same general rock-mass, yet they never
seem broken or abridged in any way as to their contour lines, however
abruptly they may dip their sides. Viewed one by one, they seem
detached beauties, like extracts from a poem, while, from the
completeness of their lines and the way that their trees are arranged,
each seems a finished stanza in itself. Contemplating the arrangement
of the trees on these small islands, a distinct impression is produced
of their having been sorted and harmonized as to size like a
well-balanced bouquet. On some of the smaller tufted islets a group of
tapering spruces is planted in the middle, and two smaller groups that
evidently correspond with each other are planted on the ends at about
equal distances from the central group; or the whole appears as one
group with marked fringing trees that match each other spreading around
the sides, like flowers leaning outward against the rim of a vase.
These harmonious tree relations are so constant that they evidently are
the result of design, as much so as the arrangement of the feathers of
birds or the scales of fishes.
Thus perfectly beautiful are these blessed evergreen islands, and their
beauty is the beauty of youth, for though the freshness of their
verdure must be ascribed to the bland moisture with which they are
bathed from warm ocean-currents, the very existence of the islands,
their features, finish, and peculiar distribution, are all immediately
referable to ice-action during the great glacial winter just now
drawing to a close.
