All
the long high-walled fiords into which these great glaciers of the first
class flow are of course crowded with icebergs of every conceivable
form, which are detached with thundering noise at intervals of a few
minutes from an imposing ice-wall that is thrust forward into deep
water. But these Pacific Coast icebergs are small as compared with those
of Greenland and the Antarctic region, and only a few of them escape
from the intricate system of channels, with which this portion of the
coast is fringed, into the open sea. Nearly all of them are swashed and
drifted by wind and tide back and forth in the fiords until finally
melted by the ocean water, the sunshine, the warm winds, and the copious
rains of summer. Only one glacier on the coast, observed by Prof.
Russell, discharges its bergs directly into the open sea, at Icy Cape,
opposite Mount St. Elias. The southernmost of the glaciers that reach
the sea occupies a narrow, picturesque fiord about twenty miles to the
northwest of the mouth of the Stikeen River, in latitude 56 deg. 50'. The
fiord is called by the natives "Hutli," or Thunder Bay, from the noise
made by the discharge of the icebergs.
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