AN ALASKA FOREST

Lake Wakatip Mail, Issue 1586, 22 April 1887, Page 3

AN ALASKA FOREST

Wandering around the damp I was struck with astonishment at the great size of the trees of the forest into which we had crept. Within twenty feet of our camp-fire were two trees, one of which measured twenty feet seven inches, and the other seventeen feet, in circumference, at the height ofa person's arm Trom the ground. The latter had its thick, shaggy bark stripped off nearly to the ground, being a dead tree, and thus losing much of its measurement. About thirty yards from the camp was a tree that gavo twenty-one feet in circumference, at about six feet from the ground. Tho most astonishiug part was that such a forest should be actually surrounded by ice ten to tweuty miles across in every direction. Of course it is reasonable to suppose that trees were here before the ice, and that this forest once connected with the forests of the great flat lands. Here was evidence that this small forest was being obliterated rapidly by the advancing Guyot glacier, the foot-ice grinding the huge trees into pulp and splinters as surely as a quartz-crusher grinds the rock into powder. Trees five and six feet through were bent over and splintered as if they were brush, while some of the fallen trunks were split longitudinally into perfsct kindlingwood. It was the mills of the gods grinding slowly, &c. Nor were they grinding so very slowly either, as one could see by comparing them with other glacial action near by. But a little way off, probably a half a mile to a mile away, was a small of woods, into which the glacier in the past had protruded, as shown by the fallen shattered trunks that lay near the edge of a small moraine, from which the glacier has now retreated a few number of rods. Out from the bristling line of shattered treejjtrunks, piled over each other for nearly or fully 100 yards, all the spruce trees were dead, but still standing, their whitened trunks and long, gaunt limbs contrasting strongly and conspicuously with the trees still covered with foliage that formed their background. These dead evergreens have been actually killed by the proximity to the ice without its touching them, and either by its chilling influence, kept up throughout the year for probably centuries, or the constant application of ice-water about their roots preventing their growth ; for along this foot-ice there was always a marshy stream of ice-water draining off to the nearest muddy creek or rill. This was true of the glacier foot, not over fifty yards from our camp in the forest, for here we got our water for cooking purposes ; but here, also, the ice of the glacier had evidently come forward so fast that the trees were rather killed by direct crushing of their trunks and limbs than by the slower one of the influence of great masses of ice near by, and it was possible to Bit down on this foot-ice of the Guyot glacier, probably tan ortwenty feet thickat this point and at the same time be under the shade of a huge evergreen tree, if a person desired two such cooling influences at the same time. Thus I came to the conclusion that the front of this great glacier was like the fingers of some huge, radiating animal, prolonging themselves outwards and retracting again at long intervals, and requiring many human lives, one after another,to measure a single stride and its backward flow.—Frederick Schwatz, in N. Y. Times.