Multimedia Mania/abacus-multimedia-mania.iso/dp/0099/00997.txt

Text File | 1993-07-27 | 14KB | 239 lines

$Unique_ID{bob00997}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{Glacier Bay
Gem of Alaska's Inside Passage}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Various}
$Affiliation{National Park Service;U.S. Department Of The Interior}
$Subject{glacier
bay
ice
muir
national
time
joe
area
monument
muz
see
pictures
see
figures
}
$Date{1983}
$Log{See John Muir*0099701.scf
}
Title:       Glacier Bay
Book:        Part I: Welcome To Glacier Bay
Author:      Various
Affiliation: National Park Service;U.S. Department Of The Interior
Date:        1983

Gem of Alaska's Inside Passage

Overview of Glacier Bay

     People are attracted to Glacier Bay, not only for its spectacular scenery
in and around the bay, but also for the whales and other wildlife, the
Fairweather Range, and the vast unspoiled coast.  This book describes both the
natural and human history of the Glacier Bay area.

     Alaska's Glacier Bay confronts us with a mad jumble of paradoxes.
Attempts to describe it juxtapose references to thunderous booming of ice and
overwhelming silence.  The landscape rests both brashly new and bedrock old,
at once eternal and transitory, everlasting and ephemeral.  The ice sheets
lock up climatic history while rewriting today's topography.  The crushing
magnitude contrasts with the uncanny finesse of staged plant recovery.  It is
as though two worlds were unrolling like the ends of a scroll ice receding and
vegetation advancing.  Might there not be a seam between these two worlds, one
wonders, some extra-dimensional passage?  No.  Both are but landscapes and
timescapes of our own one world.

     John Muir came here in 1879 pursuing the reality of what he had earlier
tracked as a mere ghost throughout California's High Sierra.  He had trekked
the California highcountry to find telltale etchings of massive glaciation,
wishing to demonstrate the then novel and religiously disruptive glaciation
theories of Swiss scientist Louis Agassiz.  In Glacier Bay country, just below
the shoulder of Alaska's south-reaching coastal arm, Muir trekked the real
thing in action.  He contemplated landscapes newly emerged from the Little Ice
Age, a geologically recent winter's night that had lasted some ten centuries.
Muir knew:  At Glacier Bay you can get lost both in space and in time.

[See John Muir: The theory of worldwide glaciation, published in 1840, only
slowly supplanted the Biblical flood in explaining contemporary landforms.
Naturalist John Muir championed this glacial theory in the United States. Muir
canoed into Glacier Bay with Tlingit paddlers in 1879 from Fort Wrangell to
see firsthand the massive glacier now named for him.]

     Muir's letters to the San Francisco Bulletin newspaper attracted Eliza
Ruhamah Scidmore to Glacier Bay.  "Steaming slowly up the inlet, the bold,
clifflike front of the glacier grew in height as we approached it," she wrote
on her second trip in 1885, "and there was a sense of awe as the ship drew
near enough for us to hear the strange, continual rumbling of the subterranean
or subglacial waters, and see the avalanches of ice that, breaking from the
front, rushed down into the sea with tremendous crashes and roars."  Despite
the whales, despite the seals, despite the stupendous coastal mountain
scenery, it is first and foremost the stark drama of tidewater glaciers that
makes Glacier Bay the gem of southeastern Alaska's protected coastal sea lane
known as the Inside Passage.  "Words and dry figures can give one little idea
of this glacial torrent," Scidmore wrote, ". . . the beauty of the fantastic
ice front, shimmering with all the prismatic hues, is beyond imagery or
description."  Her first glimpse of Muir Glacier had reduced her to silence.
Today, thousands of people visit Glacier Bay each summer.  Most come by cruise
ship, others fly into nearby Gustavus or directly to, the park in charter
aircraft.  The park's mountains the Fairweather and St. Elias Ranges, are
perhaps the world's most spectacularly glaciated mountains.  The bay itself is
home to seals, porpoises, and whales. The mountainous shores are dotted with
birdlife, with black bears and brown/grizzly bears, and with mountain goats.

     Recorded history as we generally credit it had begun for the Glacier Bay
area nearly 150 years before Muir's coming.  The log of the Russian packet
boat St. Paul, commanded by Alexis Tchirikov, records for July 15, 1741:
"This must be America, judging by the latitude and longitude."  Tchirikov had
sighted the Fairweather Range.  The next day his compatriot Vitus Bering
sighted land north of here and named Mt. St. Elias.  Bering's name survives as
a sea, a strait, and as a former land bridge between Russia and what is now
Alaska.  Tchirikov's log book survived the voyage; Tchirikov did not.

     Actually, the Fairweather - a misnomer! - Range was not named until 1778,
when James Cook, commanding His Majesty's sloop, Resolution, sailed into the
area.  For the next several years, assorted Russians and Aleuts lured by sea
otters visited, but no records survive.  Then in 1786 Frenchman Jean Francois
de Galaup, comte de Laperouse, put into what is now Lituya Bay.  Tlingit
Indian legend records Laperouse's visit, calling him Yealth.  He managed to
"purchase" Cenotaph Island from one Tlingit chief, leaving a medallion and
records to that effect stashed in rocks there; these either remain
undiscovered or were destroyed by later Russian or other visitors.  He spent
27 days in Lituya Bay, and his log book describes in detail both Tlingits and
the surrounding gigantic wilderness.  Not least, he describes a calving berg:
A fragment of ice, which fell into the water near half a mile off, occasioned
such a swell along the shore, that my boat was upset, and thrown to some
distance on the border of the glacier.  This accident was soon repaired, and
we returned on board . . . ."  Mt. La Perouse and the magnificent La Perouse
Glacier on the park's outer coast inscribe this Frenchman's name here.

     By the time of Laperouse and Cook, explorers were plying the American
Northwest Coast fueled by a rich mixture of greed and geographic
misinformation.  They sought the mythic Northwest Passage, that supposed
navigable route across North America to a lucrative China trade.  Imagine then
their disappointment to confront staggering glacial blockades walling off
progress inland so immediately after they quit the open Pacific.

     The number of discrete tidewater glaciers has increased significantly
since Capt. George Vancouver, who had been a midshipman on Cook's ship, spied
what would become Glacier Bay from Icy Strait on his own expedition in 1794.
Simply put, the entire bay was then one mighty ice sheet almost to its mouth.

     If Eliza Scidmore was one of Glacier Bay's first tourists, she was soon
succeeded not by more tourists but by glaciologists and plant ecologists.
Spectacles of nature abound throughout most of Alaska, but in Glacier Bay you
can still step right off the Little Ice Age and walk across nearly two
centuries of plant succession, seeing how ice-scoured land recovers by stages
to mature coastal forest.  Glacier Bay offered glaciologists and plant
ecologists a compact natural laboratory of time and space too good to pass up.
"Discovered" in 1879, prominent by 1884, world famous by 1886, the Muir
Glacier that Scidmore saw would next be unattainable by tourists.  An
earthquake rocked the Alaskan coast at 12:20 p.m. on September 10, 1899.
Within hours, Glacier Bay was a mass of impenetrable floating ice.  The
glacier's terminus was devastated by the quake and went into rapid retreat.
For the next few years ships could generally get within only 8 kilometers (5
miles) of the Muir Ice front.  This cataclysmic chance marked the end of the
era of description for Glacier Bay.  The era of explanation then began, and
continues today, as Ruth Kirk testifies in Part 2 of this handbook.

     Several Glacier Bay facts amply demonstrate the rapid, massive changes
here: Tchirikov could not have entered Glacier Bay in 1741 because it was a
vast ice sheet.  Captain Vancouver found Icy Strait much choked with ice in
1794, and Glacier Bay was a mere dent in the shoreline then.  Yet by 1879 John
Muir found that the sometimes 1,200-meter-(4,000-foot) thick mantle of ice had
retreated 77 kilometers (48 miles) up the bay.  By 1916 the Grand Pacific
Glacier stood 105 kilometers (65 miles) from the mouth of Glacier Bay.  This
rapid pace of glacial retreat is known nowhere else in the world.  This
central fact, plus its exemplification of plant succession, its great natural
beauty, and its value to marine mammals and other wildlife, inspired the move
to protect Glacier Bay.

     The Ecological Society of America, with the impetus of William S. Cooper
who had studied the plant succession and relict forests, in 1921 recommended
that a national monument be established at Glacier Bay.  Five reasons were
enumerated: the tidewater glaciers; other scientific features including
ancient forest remnants; the coastal forests; the historical associations
since Vancouver's time; and the relative accessibility to travel, compared
with other tidewater glacier areas.  The Society recommended a national
monument because such areas could be established by Presidential proclamation,
whereas national parks could be created only by Congress.  In 1924, President
Calvin Coolidge ordered the temporary withdrawal of one million hectares (2.5
million acres), and in 1925 he proclaimed the Glacier Bay National Monument.
All seemed well.

     Local agitation for opening the area to mining followed, however, and in
1916 a bill to do just this was quickly approved by Congress two days before
its adjournment for the Democratic National Convention.  President Franklin
Delano Roosevelt signed it three days later.  Conservationists who had worked
two years for the monument's establishment with mining excluded were shocked.

     With support from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the monument
boundary was enlarged significantly in 1939.  Again because of local pressure
however, the boundary was reduced somewhat in 1955.  Another large addition to
the monument was made in 1978.  In 1980, Congress redesignated the area
Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve.  The national park now includes some
1.3 million hectares (3.2 million acres) and the national preserve some 23,000
hectares (57,000 acres).  The national park portion is closed to mining, of
course, and much of it is further protected as part of the National Wilderness
Preservation System.  These management distinctions are explained in Part 3 of
this handbook.

     The 1930's mining flap unwittingly centered about an indefatigable
prospector named Joe Ibach.  He put ashore at Ptarmigan Creek, northwest of
Reid Glacier, in the early summer of 1925.  Nearby Ibach hit gold-bearing
veins and staked them, registering them later that summer.  So began a
three-decade association with Reid Inlet for Joe and his wife, Muz, just as,
on the other side of the continent, the fight for establishing the monument
was just grinding toward resolution.

     The Ibachs' gold operations, in association first with Capt. Tom Smith
and later with novelist Rex Beach, never amounted to anything.  One season's
yield was enough to cover the smelting work in Juneau, but not the freight,
for which the smelter billed Ibach and Smith!  The next year was more
profitable.  After all was said and done, Joe and Muz netted $13 and Smith
netted $13.  At that, the latter threw in his pick and sledge.  Beach never
realized anything from mining here.

     The cabin that still stands at the entrance to Reid Inlet was built by
the Ibachs about 1940 and Muz soon put in the vegetable garden with dirt
hauled in ore sacks from Lemesurier Island.  Three spruces, also imports, were
planted there far ahead of their ecological time, since the Reid Glacier was
then less than 5 kilometers (3 miles) away.  Captain Smith recounts that Joe
and Muz had agreed that if one of the couple died while they were in the wilds
together, the other would die right away.  "I think I would feel the same
way," Smith reflected, "if I had lived out there all that time with a wife."
The Ibachs' last year together at Reid Inlet was 1956.  Muz died in Juneau's
St. Ann's Hospital in 1959.  Joe died in 1960, still planning to visit Reid
Inlet.  The morning after planning his return, Joe shot himself. At the bottom
of his will, written on brown wrapping paper, Joe had added: "There's a time
to live and a time to die.  This is the time."  The unconscious ambiguity
somehow sits well in this terrain of paradoxes.

     Of all Glacier Bay's extremely few residents since Indian days, perhaps
only Joe and Muz Ibach and Jim Huscroft stand out.  Huscroft lived alone on
Cenotaph Island in Lituya Bay from 1915 or 1917 to 1939, when he died there,
still alone.  He was the only outer coast resident for a 240-kilometer (150-
mile) stretch.  Once a year he went to Juneau for supplies and to pick up the
past year's stack of newspapers, saved for him at the Elks Club.  Back home on
the island, he read one paper a day, a year late, never cheating by reading
ahead one day.  Huscroft's biggest yearly event was Christmas dinner. He sat
down to it alone with the choice of 14 kinds of homemade pie!

     There must be profound satisfaction in venturing, as Eliza Scidmore did,
to such an area as Glacier Bay so early in its tourist history.  Indeed, after
describing the Muir ice front and "the crack of the rending ice, the crash of
the falling fragments" with their steady undertone like the boom of Yosemite
Falls, Scidmore adds this note: "There was something, too, in the
consciousness that so few had ever gazed upon the scene before us, and there
were neither guides nor guide books to tell us which way to go, and what
emotions to feel."  Those words appear, paradoxically in her illustrated
guidebook, Journeys in Alaska, issued the very next summer.  We hope this
Glacier Bay handbook serves you as well as hers served a generation of Alaskan
travelers.