AN ALASKAN LAKE
AMID UNMAPPED MOUNTAINS. Rising almost sheer from the sea. at the; point where tho southward-trending strip of Alaska bordering British Columbia' on tho Pacific, turning a comer, suddenly widens into the tremendous teiritory whose shores are washed by tho Northern Pacific; liehring Sea, and. tho Arctic Ocean; is a. group, of groat mountains. They include among others .not even mapped,- or named. All. Logan, 19,500 fad; -Ml. St. Elias, 18,080 feet;. Alt. Cook, nearly the same height,' anil Mt. .Puirweather; 10,290-.feet, all .suspect-, 'billy more or less volcanic. '■ They tire known, as tho Jit. St. Elias range, some 700 miles in total length, of which Alt. Logan, some distance inland from tho sea, is the northern outpost. Porty miles north and east of tho towering height of Alt. Logan, fairly in view from its lonely waters. ■ lying, amid tho heights of encircling mountains, as n JiH'io dewdrop in a titanic c/inklc of the continental surface, is tho .fifty-mile length of Lake Kluahne. once reputed source of tho Yukon,, flowing from it 1200 miles ol' more north, north-west, and ■ south-west to Bullring Sea. Barely 350 miles south of tho Arctic Circle, southern boundary of perpetual snow .and ico. it is compassed about with mouutain hinges and peaks rising abruptly from its waters, says ;v special dispatch to the "Christian Scienca Monitor." Amid tho close-holding heights lio snowficlds and glaciers 'uncounted, from w.bose caverned. fronts issue, tho silvery threads, seen from afar so delicately, liquid))- cobwebby, through tho blue dusk of alpine .ravines, iVhasc numberless flowings and torrential unions with the lifting of tho Yukon winter and the coming of tho suddon northern summer feed the lake and its tributaries to the Yukon, main- and tributary streams alike, tho ullimathule of gold hunters since the roaring Klondike days of '9(1. The shores of tho lako are. baio of vegetation, save for the dwarf birch and lilio hardy northern willow, tundra trasses, and lesser brush. This is not to say that there aifl not flowers throughout tho Yukon and in the north generally, for there aro many. in addition to fruit-preceding | Howew of many native berries, tho ground is gay. wherever soil and exposure serve, with species unnumbered of often most'heautiitii flowers, though to the present very s&'.itily described, often not mentioned at all. Many of them are peculiar only to these regions. This floral wealth has been noted to points far upVitb. tho Arctic Circle.
Its beaches are rockslrown and shingly, baro of drift, so that even the stranded, weather-bleached trunk is an event .of discovery, and Clio raro, optimistically prospering crow is a startiugly insistent accent of prismatic darkness Lapped in'the perputual'silence of tho unpeopled north, sternly isolate, untouched by human presence, savo for at, lons intervals a casual Indian or passing prospector, Lake Kluahiic has in its very silence and slerness of aspect a beauty of'that hardly nspressed, indefinable, but none tho less deeply felt nature which, conscious of I? or not, is a main factor in holding tho prospector or other man of the open places in his wandering ways, in the sand desvrts of the south, or the. mountain wildernesses of the extreme north-west alike. When at evening the clouds hang low, hiding the peaks, and upward fling their fringed banners that on round and changing swell throw back the coppery light of sundown; when tho mountain sides below ore all but lost in a Hood of light pouring through some great cleft, the distant shore tho darker beneath it, while the rilttod water resepondent becomes a sheet of liquid lire, at such a moment of eouceiitratcdly stern splendour is perceived in some measure the attraction of the unpeopled places of tho earth from those who nomadically dwell far from the gathered cities.
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Dominion, Volume 12, Issue 274, 15 August 1919, Page 9
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628AN ALASKAN LAKE Dominion, Volume 12, Issue 274, 15 August 1919, Page 9
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