r-Browne party surmounted in a
few days, relaying their camping stuff and supplies, was to occupy us
for three weeks while we hewed a staircase three miles long in the
shattered ice.

[Sidenote: Glacier Movement]

It was the realization of the earthquake and of what it had done that
convinced us that this Muldrow Glacier has a very slow rate of movement.
The great blocks of ice hurled down from above lay apparently just where
they had fallen almost a year before. At the points of sharp descent, at
the turns in its course, at the points where tributary glaciers were
received, the movement is somewhat more rapid. We saw some crevasses
upon our descent that were not in existence when we went up. But for the
whole stretch of it we were satisfied that a very few feet a year would
cover its movement. No doubt all the glaciers on this side of the range
are much more sluggish than on the other side, where the great
precipitation of snow takes place.

We told Johnny to look for us in two weeks. It was thirty-one days ere
we rejoined him. For now began the period of suspense, of hope blasted
anew nearly every morning, the period of weary waiting for decent
weather. With the whole mountain and glacier enveloped in thick mist it
was not possible to do anything up above, and day after day this was the
condition, varied by high wind and heavy snow. From the inexhaustible
cisterns of the Pacific Ocean that vapor was distilled, and ever it rose
to these mountains and poured all over them until every valley, every
glacier, every hollow, was filled to overflowing. There seemed sometimes
to us no reason why the process should not go on forever. The situation
was not without its ludicrous side, when one had the grace to see it.
Here were four men who had already passed through the long Alaskan
winter, and now, when the rivers were breaking and the trees bursting
into leaf, the flowers spangling every hillside, they were deliberately
pushing themselves up into the winter still, with the long-expected
summer but a day's march away.

The tedium of lying in that camp while snow-storm or fierce, high wind
forbade adventure upon the splintered ridge was not so great to the
writer as to some of the other members of the expedition, for there was
always Walter's education to be prosecuted, as it had been prosecuted
for three winters on the trail and three summers on the launch, in a
desultory but not altogether unsuccessful manner. An hour or t