We Alaskans 4/4/99
Copyright Anchorage Daily News

Coquetting With Glaciers

John Muir loved the ice of Prince William Sound. The author explains why.

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Reading from John Muir
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In the Wake of Harriman

By Nancy Lord

From Port Wells, armed with our topographical map, my friends and I begin picking out the mountain peaks -- Mount Muir, Mount Curtis, Mounts Coville, Emerson, Gilbert and Gannett, all named for members of the 1899 Harriman Alaska Expedition. The short dark one in the foreground -- Mount Doran, named for the captain of the steamship that carried the expedition along Alaska's coast for two luxurious summer months. One very significant week was spent cruising within Prince William Sound, ''coquetting with glaciers,'' as the trip historian, naturalist John Burroughs, expressed it.

The Harriman group enjoyed a spell of fabulously clear and calm June weather in the Sound. We're extremely lucky to find matching weather in August; the guide on our ''26 Glaciers'' tour, a six-hour boat excursion out of Whittier, has told us we've hit one of only five days all summer when it's been possible to see the mountains.

Up ahead: Point Doran and Doran Strait, two more significant landmarks named for the captain. I'm unreasonably excited -- not about the glaciers we're scheduled to see, or the rafts of sea otters we continue to pass, or the seals basking on icebergs, or the chicken lunch being served on the lower level -- but about passing a mere point of land.

We're in Barry Arm, facing Barry Glacier, the glacier that 100 years ago filled the arm nearly to the point we call Doran and that soon after retreated about five miles, to roughly its current position. Our ship swings wide around the point. The navigational chart shows depths of only one to four fathoms along a curved underwater ridge -- Barry Glacier's terminal moraine, the farthest point to which the glacier pushed before retreating.

A century ago, the charts ended here. Here, in 1898, the U.S. Army reconnaissance team that named Barry Glacier (after a favorite colonel) went as close as it dared to the glacier described as ''formidable'' before steaming back to safety. The glacier then was dropping ice chunks 20 times the size of the explorers' boat.

But the Harriman expedition just one year later met with Barry at a quieter moment, when the glacier's retreat had opened a bit more of a passage, nearly a mile wide (not a great distance given the height of the glacier, the waves falling ice could launch and the currents to be navigated.) As we motor through the widened Doran Strait, I have no trouble imagining that historical moment.

First, the local pilot handed the ship's wheel to Capt. Doran, saying, ''I am not going to be responsible for her if she is to be run into every uncharted channel and frog marsh.'' Doran took the ship to within half a mile of the glacier before stopping.

John Muir, the ''other John'' on the expedition, was an apparent instigator. Like Burroughs, he was an old gray-beard, but, unlike Burroughs, he was an intrepid Alaska traveler, whose particular interest lay in the country's glaciers; 20 years earlier he'd ''discovered'' Alaska's Glacier Bay, where a prominent glacier was given his name. When Harriman asked him at the front of Barry Glacier whether he'd seen enough, Muir apparently launched into a dissertation about the trends of the fiord and surrounding country and speculated that through the passage lay more of the same, a ''hidden half of the landscape.'' Perhaps, he suggested, Harriman could have a boat lowered for him and he could take a look.

Perhaps, Harriman countered, they could run the ship there. Against all advice of the ship's captain and pilot, he ordered the ship to proceed. ''I will take the risk,'' he said. And, ''We will discover a new Northwest Passage.''

The steamship didn't ground on the submerged moraine, swamp in waves from the calving glacier or run into uncharted obstacles. It did, on its return, get caught in a tidal current and nearly smack into Barry Glacier before responding to its helm. The Harriman expedition did discover, not a Northwest Passage, but a major piece of geography -- 12 more miles of spectacular fiord, 11 more dramatic glaciers, a brave new world of mountains and forests and wildflower fields. Harriman Fiord today is considered one of the most scenic sights in all of Alaska.

The Harriman Alaska Expedition had not set out to make geographical discoveries. By the end of the 19th century, Alaska had been well explored by Russians, Americans, Spaniards and the English, who'd left their multicultural names all over the maps. Prince William Sound was inhabited then by the Native Chugach and Eyak people and, increasingly, by Americans out to make their fortunes in mining, the canned salmon industry and fur farming. Burroughs commented upon the gold miners in particular: ''Alaska is full of such adventurers ransacking the land.''

The aims of the Harriman expedition were at least three-fold. Edward Harriman, head of the Union Pacific Railroad and perhaps the richest man in America at the time, was intent on spending a relaxed summer vacation with his family. (His son Averell, later to be governor and diplomat, was 8 years old.) He also wanted to kill a trophy-size brown bear. And he'd invited along, in order to benefit the world at large, 25 of the country's most eminent natural scientists and natural history writers as well as several top artists and photographers. His chartered ship, the George W. Elder, was largely at the service of the scientists, who could suggest routes and stops and ask for drop-offs and pick-ups, that they might do their desired collecting and measuring. (A fourth Harriman goal, speculated about for a century, may have been to determine the possibility of linking the world by rail, by passing either under or over the Bering Strait to Russia. The ship did travel all the way to the Russian side of the Bering Strait.)

It must have been head-spinning to have been along on the Harriman ride, aboard what they came to call, for the combined expertise shared in evening lectures, ''a floating university.'' Harriman's guests included these remarkable personages: C. Hart Merriam, head of the U. S. Biological Survey and chief expedition scientist in charge of selecting and managing the rest of the scientific party; William Dall, known as Alaska's first scientist and author of the then-definitive text about Alaska; Grove Karl Gilbert, Western explorer and glaciologist; Henry Gannett, chief geographer of the U.S. Geological Survey; Burroughs and Muir; Edward Curtis, photographer who would go on to be famous for his record of Native Americans; George Bird Grinnell, founder of the Audubon Society and an ethnographer of Native cultures; Louis Agassiz Fuertes, the bird artist; and landscape painters R. Swain Gifford (illustrator of Theodore Roosevelt's hunting books) and Frederick S. Dellenbaugh (who had been an artist on the Powell expedition down the Colorado River 27 years earlier). Other expedition members, less remembered today, were leaders in the fields of botany, zoology, geology, forestry, mineralogy and ornithology.

Glaciers were one area of particular interest of the expedition, both for their general novelty and because little study had been made of Alaska's. The group spent a week in Glacier Bay, Muir's stomping grounds of 20 years previous, where they were surprised to discover not only glaciers in rapid retreat but plank walks laid along the glacial moraines for the comfort of a burgeoning tourist industry. Here the Harriman women took delight in walking beside crevasses, Muir climbed aboard an iceberg and the photographers swamped their canoe in a giant wave caused by an icefall. Here, too, a zoologist collected ice worms, previously unknown to science, and others in the party measured, mapped, calculated masses and looked at trees knocked over by glacial advance. The study of glaciers continued in Yakutat Bay to the west, where several more days were spent exploring Russell Fiord and Malaspina Glacier.

At its next stop, in Prince William Sound, the expedition reached country that had been far less visited than that to the east and south and had never been scientifically explored. At massive Columbia Glacier, which they named (or renamed -- it had been previously named Freemantle) for the university, they left off a party that included Gilbert, the glaciologist, and Curtis, the principal photographer.

Farther to the northwest, on the same day the expedition boldly entered what they would name Harriman Fiord, they also explored another large fiord at the north end of Port Wells. Although that ice-choked fiord was first mentioned in Vancouver's journals a hundred years before, and then was described by an Army survey team in 1898, it was left to the Harriman expedition to give it its first scientific look.

Continuing the theme they'd begun at Columbia, they named the two large glaciers at the head of what would become College Fiord Harvard and Yale, the small glacier that connected to Harvard Radcliffe, the other glaciers on the west side Smith, Bryn Mawr, Vassar, and Wellesley, and the main glacier on the east side Amherst. (Here again they indulged in some renaming; Harvard and Yale glaciers had the year before been named Twin Glaciers -- West and East.)

College affiliations apparently were of major interest to the expedition scientists, who reportedly practiced their various college cheers in the ship's salon.

It was already evening when the Elder turned west and paused at Barry Glacier before charging into new country. In the long days of an Alaska June, the evening light is particularly warm and illuminative, setting whole mountainsides and peaks on fire. Once around the point, Muir described the scene in a tribute he later wrote to Harriman: ''The sail up this majestic fiord in the evening sunshine, picturesquely varied glaciers coming successively to view, sweeping from high snowy foundations and discharging their thundering wave-raising icebergs, was, I think, the most exciting experience of the whole trip.''

Burroughs, a more understated observer than Muir, also proclaimed the going, ''where no ship had ever before passed'' as ''one of the most exciting moments of our voyage. Glaciers hung on the steep mountainsides all about us like the stretched skins of huge polar bears.''

Our tour boat, part of the regular but not extensive traffic that enters Harriman Fiord these days, carries us under afternoon sunshine into that same dramatic landscape. The glaciers do indeed -- with their great wrinkled backs -- look something like Bunyanesque white bear skins. The mountains, unnamed except for those few peaks commemorating Harriman expeditioners, are steep and rugged, the bowls filled with year-round snow and streaked with slides. Mount Muir's serrated top looks fresh-cut against the sky. Even without thundering ice falls, the scene feels primordial, as though we're present at the creation. We are, almost literally, back in the ice-age; these glaciers are among few in the world still very close to their maximum positions of recent centuries.

The Harriman expedition ship spent only a few hours within the new fiord, but when it turned back to repair a damaged propeller (a blade broken on ice in College Fiord) and retrieve scientists left at other locations, Muir and the geographer Gannett stayed behind with a small party. As recorded in Muir's journal, this group seemingly made the most of the next three days. Starting from ''a paradise of a camp on a bench covered with Cassiope [heather],'' they spent ''a grand exhilarating evening, pitying them on the ship.'' The next day, exploring the shore on foot, Muir took note of the glaciers, rock, waterfalls, bird life (abundant ptarmigan) and especially the vegetation. The group found tree stumps cut by earlier hunters, one of which, a hemlock 9 inches across, Muir aged at 325 years old by counting its growth rings. This told them that trees in the region were very slow-growing, and that the areas of old-growth forest had not been glaciated for at least hundreds of years. The following day they rowed seven miles in rain toward the fiord's mouth and established another camp, near a spot they deduced had been a recent hunting camp and site of a bear kill. The Harriman expeditioners may have been the first people to enter the fiord by ship, but Native people apparently had been hunting within it for some time.

Here again, from its various camps and walks and viewing points onshore and off, Muir's group photographed, measured and mapped the fiord and its glaciers.

What, in the end, was the value of the scientific work conducted by the Harriman expedition? Certainly there were limitations. The expedition lasted only two months and covered thousands of miles at steamship pace. The wishes of the individual scientists to see or study specific locales or phenomena had to be balanced with the Harriman family's touristic impulses and Harriman's drive to shoot a bear, a goal that met with surprising difficulty. Muir was disappointed when the ship bypassed another bay of glaciers that had been scheduled, Harriman having declared there was no more ''ice time.'' Certainly others felt the same way every time the ship's whistle called them back from their work. Ultimately, the expedition's science could amount to no more than a survey or reconnaissance, a sampling of what could be seen and collected at those points along the Alaska coast where weather, time and terrain allowed.

In 1899, though, even such a limited reconnaissance had its value. The expedition returned with, among other things, 5,000 mounted insect specimens and an equal number of professional landscape photographs. From the biological collections, several hundred new species and over 50 new genera were identified, along with their geographical distributions; the collections of marine specimens were particularly strong. Although not a major focus of the expedition, Native cultures were documented and their songs and languages recorded on Harriman's newfangled wax cylinder graphophone. For 12 years after the expedition, teams of additional scientists labored under the direction of Merriam on the 13 volumes of reports financed, like the trip itself, entirely by Harriman. Many of these volumes became standard reference works for later researchers.

It may be that the most significant scientific work of the Harriman expedition was its contributions to glaciology. A history of the expedition written in 1982, ''Looking Far North,'' called the glacier volume of the expedition's report ''the most profound'' in the series and its author, Gilbert, ''unquestioningly the most brilliant 'scientific' aboard the George W. Elder his study of Alaska glaciers represents the pinnacle of the expedition's contribution to science.''

Modern glaciologists do indeed give high marks to Gilbert's glacier study. Retired U.S. Geological Survey scientists Mark F. Meier and Austin Post, who have studied the glaciers of Prince William Sound for 50 years, have described Gilbert's early work as prophetic, his arguments in parallel to modern theory. In a report they co-authored in 1979 assessing Gilbert's study of Alaska's tidewater glaciers, they wrote, ''Examining Gilbert's documents, the modern glaciologist may be surprised to discover that so many ideas, thought to be new, were in fact anticipated 80 years ago by one of America's most remarkable and brilliant scientists.'' Although the physical principles Gilbert relied on would today be considered naive, and his arguments were couched largely in descriptive terms, concepts he put forward are extremely similar to what would emerge much later in more defined scientific terms. The questions he raised about glacial calving, erosion and behavior on the seabed remain prominent in glaciological thought today.

Instead of focusing on theory, as earlier geologists had, Gilbert took a ''classical'' approach based on observations of behavior, and the behavior he observed he linked to his earlier work in hydrology. Glaciers, he saw, flowed according to many of the same principles as water or molten rock. Moreover, he noted that some of Alaska's glaciers were advancing while others were retreating, and he linked these cyclic movements and their rates to climate changes plus local conditions including topography. He came very close to understanding the major factor controlling the behavior of tidewater glaciers -- the depth of water at their termini, which determines how much ice is exposed to the melting effects of sea water. When glaciers push up terminal moraines in front of them, they have less exposure and will melt less; once they melt away from moraines, they have more exposure, will melt more and typically begin irreversible retreats.

A major value of Gilbert's report certainly lies in its descriptions. On the Harriman expedition, Gilbert studied and described nearly 40 glaciers. He made almost that many shore landings, three of which lasted for several days, and was not averse to climbing steep and rugged terrain to gain the best vantage points. He was able, working with the photographers, the map maker Gannett and others, to document not only individual glaciers and their processes but a landscape marked by hanging valleys, moraines, kettle ponds and other evidence of previous glacial coverage. He described at length appearances, distances, heights and even minute details of glaciers and their surroundings. His intent was to build a body of data and observations of very localized areas, that it might be useful to later scientists.

The map made for Gilbert's report of Port Wells, showing Harriman and College fiords and their glaciers, is amazingly detailed. It drew upon Gannett's surveying with a plane-table, photographs and the work of previous travelers, and looks, for its bird's-eye accuracy, like something that could only have been produced after the introduction of aircraft.

As part of his commitment to documentation, Gilbert was perhaps the first geologist to recognize the importance of establishing photographic stations that might be returned to year after year as a way of documenting the movement of glaciers and other changes in them and to their surroundings. Several still-in-use stations in Prince William Sound, marked by rock cairns, were first occupied by members of the Harriman expedition, and thus provide a hundred-year record, something like extreme time-lapse photography. The value of this to scientists is immense, particularly for tracking the advances and retreats of tidewater glaciers, several of which have made dramatic movements over the last century. By comparing the front of Columbia Glacier with the expedition's photographs, later researchers were able to document advances that culminated in 1910, 1921 and 1935. In 1974 hydrologist Post witnessed a small advance, in which ice pushed debris directly over one of Gilbert's stations. Columbia began a drastic retreat in the early 1980s; nine miles of water now separate it from that station.

In Harriman Fiord, our tour boat turns up Surprise Inlet, heading for Surprise Glacier. Surprise -- named by the Harriman expedition because, as the first glacier they faced on entering the fiord, it was indeed a ''surprise'' -- is today the fiord's most active glacier and the one tour boats spend the most time visiting. A hundred years ago, the glacier filled most of the inlet; today it has receded by a mile or more.

When the boat stops a quarter-mile from the glacier and the door to the front deck opens, I swarm forward with the rest of the camera-toting tourists. The ice wall, a couple of hundred feet high, is broken into blocks and columns, blue and bluer into its caverns. Behind it, the dirt-streaked ice winds down from rocky, waterfall-coursed, snow-topped mountains. The ice creaks and cracks, much more loudly than I'd expected, and I suddenly understand why the early Spanish explorer Fidalgo could have mistaken the cracking and booming of Columbia Glacier for the eruptions of a volcano. Small icefalls spill from Surprise, but those who await the kind of calving action that would rock us with waves are disappointed. Floating glacier ice -- the smallish kinds known as brash and growlers, as opposed to the larger bits and icebergs -- surrounds us; the boat's crew scoops some up for our examination and drinks.

I ask our guide about getting closer to Harriman Glacier, far at the fiord's end, and am told we won't be viewing it except at a great distance. As one of the few advancing glaciers in the sound -- or anywhere -- Harriman is not actively throwing off chunks of ice and is labeled, by our guide, as ''boring.'' (Post recently told me, though, that a newly spotted embayment at the terminus of Harriman Glacier may indicate the beginning of a retreat.)

For the moment, though, I'm happy to be surprised by Surprise. If, after 25 years of living in Alaska, I sometimes fear I'm hardened to natural beauty, lounging before this gorgeously convoluted, breathtakingly blue, huge and ancient river of ice inspires me all over again. Scientist, naturalist, ordinary tourist -- any of us privileged to gaze on this timeless spectacle must rejoice with the ghost of John Muir, to witness ''grandeur and beauty in a thousand forms awaiting us at every turn in this bright and spacious wonderland.''

Nancy Lord's latest book, ''Green Alaska: Dreams from the Far Coast,'' will be released in April from Counterpoint Press. It juxtaposes the 1899 Harriman Alaska Expedition with her own travels along Alaska's coast and considers the century of change in American attitudes toward landscape, wildlife and cultures.