This installment in the June 1925 Motor Boating is filled with photos compared to the last issue! I have to admit, there really wasn't much mentioned of the Evinrude. But, as you read, just remembering that it is their motor makes you respect the older outboards!
Only boats of very shallow draft can get up Taku River to Twin Glacier Camp. There is plenty of water in the river for boats drawing five or six feet of water, but they cannot get over the bar that the river has deposited near its mouth in Taku Inlet.
Even with the little Ikigihk, which can run almost anywhere that's a little damp, we were churning mud and sand for several miles before we finally got over the hump and into the river channel beyond. Then we had to fight a strong current and dodge a miscellaneous assortment of icebergs before we accomplished the several miles up the Taku River to the landing at Twin Glacier Camp.
Even with the long hours of summer in Alaska, the day was about gone when we arrived. Our hostess, of course, had no knowledge of our coming, there being no telegraph or telephone communication between there and Juneau. A pack of howling malamutes greeted us at the boat landing. We were delighted, however, to find Mrs. Gray, a buxom lass with a perpetual smile, and a dialect that was as difficult to understand as it is to read Bobby Burns. She welcomed us into the great log house , which is the main chamber of the hunting lodge, and in about twenty minutes we were thoroughly warmed before a great log fire in a huge fireplace. Then the dinner gong was sounded, and we sat down to a meal of planked moose steaks, with all the trimming from soup to nuts. 
The Colonel, who seemed to be the big money bag of this precious pair, wasn't a half bad sort of fellow. He broke out a square-face of bonded bourbon, and after sampling it, we were ready to concede that these mighty hunters were probably enjoying life in their own way. The Taku River country is perhaps about as nearly the sportsman's idea of paradise as can be fond on this earth. It is an uninhabited wilderness of towering snow-clad mountain peaks, virgin forests, boundless muskegs (marshes), and jungles of underbrush such as one expects to find in the tropics. Within a two-hour traveling radius of the camp, chiefly by motor boat, one may find every kind of game commonly known in Alaska - moose, black and brown bears, uncountable deer, caribou, bighorn sheep, white mountain goats, and feathered game galore.
Moose hunting had been one of Wiedley's ambitions from boyhood, so on our second day at Twin Glacier Camp, he took Ikigihk, Tommy Shorty, one of Dr. DeVighne's Indian guides, and one of my high powered rifles, and set out up the river. In four hours he was back in camp with a fine head, and half a ton of moose meat. I went fishing that day - took Dr. DeVighne's motor boat The Mud Hen, and went down the river into Turner Lake, a fresh water glacier pool that looks like Yosemite Valley with the floor covered with water.
The first toss of the fly into the lake, and it was swallowed - seemingly by a bucking horse. Half an hour later, after an indescribably thrilling struggle, I landed a rainbow trout 27 inches long. I caught three more more fish of similar size before noon, and then quit fishing because I couldn't imagine any possible use for more than 25 pounds of fish a day.
The same day Mrs. Gray went moose hunting in the muskeg over across the river. She came back late that evening, scratched, bruised, mosquito bitten, and her clothing in tatters. She told a lurid tale about trying to stalk a moose, and stumbling smack dab upon a huge brown bear. There is no denying that these bears are perhaps the largest and most ferocious animals on earth, and according to Mrs. Gray's story, the bear promptly wheeled around and chased her up the tallest spruce tree she could find in the muskeg. The Colonel looked across the table and winked. Nobody else winked, but the looks of all present signified that the story was accepted with a grain of salt.
Thereupon I began going up the tree. About twenty feet from the ground, I observed several branches from which the bark had been peeled as if by someone climbing with hob-nailed boots. I climbed perpendicular for about 120 feet, and found the same marks all the way up. It was impossible to climb higher.
I was reaching for my field glasses when I found a bright scrap of scarlet woolen yarn sticking on a mass of resin that oozed from the tree trunk. It was a fragment of the red sweater Mrs. Gray was wearing at the time of her reported encounter with the bear.
Jim and I killed no game that day, but at the dinner table in camp that evening I told the story of the spruce tree in the muskeg, with the bear tracks all around it. I told about the marks on the branches, and then as a final summing up before the jury, produced the piece of scarlet yarn found in the tree top. Mrs. Gray's story was verified beyond a reasonable doubt. As a reward I got a third piece of apple pie.
I learned later that brown bears have no friends among the Alaskans. Dr. Sinclair told of at least a dozen men he had known who had been devoured by them, and of a score of others he had tailored and repaired after the bears had left them for dead - surgery he had performed while on duty at the Chichigoff Mines. Moreover, at Twin Glacier Camp, men are not permitted to venture off the premises without being heavily armed, and women and children never leave the camp without being accompanied by an armed male escort. These Alaskan bears seem to be incredibly numerous. They attain enormous size - often sixteen hundred to eighteen hundred pounds. They are reputed to be the only animals on the American continent that will attack a human being without the slightest provocation.
After several wonderful days in the Taku River Country, an opportunity presented itself for me to return to Juneau aboard a fast motor boat. I had no purpose in making the trip virtually back to our starting point, except I was anxious to se the result obtained in the numerous photographic negatives I'd exposed. There, a resident photographer graciously extended to me the courtesies of his laboratory. I had photographs of glaciers, icebergs and what not. Everything came through the hypo about one hundred percent of anticipations. When the local photographer saw my negatives, he picked out about two dozen of them and asked if I cared to sell them. I had no desire to sell them, and told him so, but he insisted. Finally he said: "If you will just sell me those negatives - name your price, and I'll pay cash."
Just why a professional photographer, living within a few miles of scenes that he could very easily go out and photograph himself, should want to purchase a set of negatives made by one who is an amateur to those local conditions, seemed a puzzle. I asked the man to explain. This he did, saying," You made a number of these pictures from floating ice, didn't you?". "Yes", I replied. "Well, don't you ever do that again. I can't make negatives like that. Furthermore, there isn't a photographer in all of Alaska who will go aboard an iceberg to photograph anything. It's taking your life in your hands - and with buttered fingers at that. Any iceberg is liable to flop bottom side up at any minute without the slightest warning. If they don't turn over they may crumble up under our feet. In either event you're a GONER!".
He explained further that the icebergs being fresh water ice falling into salt water, begin to thaw as soon as they fall from the glaciers. The thawing occurs from underneath, so every berg eventually gets top heavy and rolls over. I thanked the man for his kindly advice, and compensated him for the use of his laboratory by presenting him with a number of negatives which were practically duplicates of the others. I got back to Taku Inlet that night aboard the United States Naval Minesweeper Swallow, which was going down there to calibrate a radio compass station.
From the Twin Glacier Camp, Wiedley and I had one more ambition to realize before we shoved off for the south again. We wanted to take Igigihk into Twin Glacier Lake, a glacial pool up the Taku, where no motor boat had ever been before. This lake is a huge glacial scar on the landscape fed by two enormous live glaciers, which are characteristically named - Twin Glaciers. The lake discharges into the Taku River through the Twin Glaciers River. The latter stream is short and swift. It drops to lower elevations very abruptly, and in mid-summer carries almost as much ice as it does water.
We left the camp at daylight - 3 o'clock in the morning, and shoved off up the Taku, with the little motor forcing the boat up against the swift current at just about one mile per hour. We were constantly zig-zagging back and forth to avoid oncoming cakes of ice, or treacherous whirlpools; but eventually we managed to cover the few miles of distance that lay up the Taku between the camp and mouth of Twin Glacier River.
We swung into Twin Glacier River. We didn't go a hundred yards before we came to a rapid where the force of the current completely neutralized the power of our motor. Great icebergs were constantly thundering down these rapids in an endless procession. Any one of these bergs crowding Igigihk against another, or against the shore, would have crushed her like a grain of wheat between millstones. There was no means of avoiding disaster except by artful dodging. Nevertheless, with the aid of two Indian guides, motor, ropes, and poles, we conquered the rapids and putt-putted out among the ice floes of Twin Glacier lake about noon.
We spent most of the afternoon exploring the ice floes, studying the myriads of waterfowl that rode on every iceberg, taking photographs, climbing over the glaciers, and listening to the constant groaning, crashing , and creaking and grinding of literally tens of millions of tons of moving ice.
Returning to the river, the descent of the rapids into the Taku, where it had taken three hours to get up, was made in scarcely more than that number of minutes. Tense, and almost breathless minutes those were, however - for, we shot down the stream at express train speed - half expecting every instant to feel the bottom of the boat leave us as we struck some hidden rock, or to feel the tiny craft crumpled like an eggshell if we got caught between the ice masses with which we were racing. Tame and roomy indeed seemed the Taku when we started down it toward our camp after that dash through the rapids!
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| Along this salt water river it was not easy to find a campsite as the light waned. |
Two weeks later, after various and sundry experiences with everything from Woolly Winds to wetting waves, and from tides to ptarmigan, we were still in Alaskan waters, but had moved down the map about three hundred miles. Scenery, icebergs, and glaciers had become almost a drug on the market. We'd eaten salmon until we felt we never wanted to look at another pink fish - not even in a can! Sorely in need of some fresh meat, we took our rifles, and started out to find it.
Some Indians with whom I talked the evening before near the mouth of the great river where we'd made camp had told us: "Cross river. Plenty moose. Plenty beeg grizzle bear too. Climb tree. Moose come. Bang!". The old chief who did the talking spoke picturesque English, but his meaning was certainly clear. So, very early that morning we took Ikigihk across the river, and into a smaller stream that drained out of an enormous muskeg. We ascended the stream for several miles. There was only about two feet of water under our keel.
Presently the stream began to grow so shallow we could barely navigate. Then we came to a beaver dam, and lifted the boat over it. Above the dam there was plenty of water - thanks to the beavers. Several beaver dams made the stream navigable for us right into the heart of the muskeg, or some six miles back from the salt water. Eventually, however, we came to the head of the navigation, and made fast to a huge spruce tree - the only tree in the muskeg. Climbing the tree for eighty feet, we scanned the muskeg with our field glasses. For half an hour we pawed mosquitoes and moose flies, and looked for game. A few minutes later we saw five moose - three of them bulls with legal hatracks. They sauntered out of the muskeg into a thicket of bush about a mile away. We promptly shinned down out of the tree.
Now , making a sneak through the marsh for a mile after game one is badly in need of for food sounds simple and easy. But, in Alaskan muskeg - well, it's a man's job! Picture yourself, if you can, sloshing along in a pair of clumsy hip boots in slimy mud and water up to your knees, and in coarse grass higher than your head. The grassis like so much rope. It is matted and tangled and full of heavy brush that's too high to climb over, too rough to be broken, and too noisy to be tampered with. Rain is coming down in torrents. There's a cloud of mosquitoes trailing you, and kept from carrying you off in pieces only by the kerosene coating over all exposed skin. You paw mosquitoes and swat moose flies, and unless you are a person of greater forbearance than Job himself, you'll develop a lurid vocabulary.
You fall down every hundred yards, and come up with twenty pounds of water in each boot. By this time you are wet from head to foot, and have ceased to care how often you fall down.
You learn to sit down in the water and empty your boots by putting your feet in the air. Then about every two hundred yards you come to a long lagoon. There's no going around. It's too deep for your boots and too wide to jump. So, you splash right in, and your teeth rattle as you go down until the water touches your chin. You struggle into the grass again, drain your boots out, and push on. That's moose hunting! I'm convinced the sport's been over-advertised.
We finally worked our way up to within a hundred yards of the point where we'd seen the moose enter the thicket. There we came to a lagoon, and in prospecting its depth, I bogged down until my hat went adrift - rifle and field glasses held high overhead as I went out of sight. Just as I came up for air Wiedley's rifle roared out three times in quick succession. I crawled out of the water with the exclamation: "What are you shooting at?" "A moose." he replied. "He's down over there."
We spent the rest of the day quartering the huge animal, and portaging the meat through the muskeg to our boat. Moosemeat was the mainstay of our diet for the next two weeks. The value of this food soon showed in our physical condition. We began to gain in weight and strength, and our energy for hard labor showed an appreciable impetus.
The sad error of underestimating the force of an opposing tide was illustrated to us one day after we passed out of Alaskan waters, and got down the coast of British Columbia into Canada. Passing through a wide strait which we assumed to be almost tide free, we rounded a rocky point, and encountered a fog as thick as the proverbial bowl of pea soup. Our charts showed 50 miles of clear sailing dead ahead, so we took our course from the charts and the compass, and forged ahead with the motor churning full throttle. For six hours we kept going, which at our normal cruising speed should have moved us about fifty miles down the map. Along toward mid-afternoon the fog lifted, and to our dismay, there we were churning the water absolutely abeam of of the identical point where we'd encountered the fog. We'd shot five gallons of gasoline and half a day getting nowhere. A few minutes later the tide turned, and we began going with it at a prodigious rate of speed. By watching the charts, and logging various points on the shore as we came abeam of them, we found ourselves flying down the salt water river at a speed of approximately 22 knots. About 8 knots of this was boat speed. The rest was tide.
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| Actually, it is "Sidney", British Columbia |
Late that afternoon we sighted an Indian in a motor boat fishing for halibut. The boat was about half a mile off our starboard bow when we sighted it, and about that moment the Indian hooked a huge fish. We could see him struggling with the monster, very distinctly through our field glasses. We altered our course, thinking to get a better view, and possibly a photograph. To our dismay, however, we soon discovered that the Indian's boat was at anchor in an 18 knot tidal current. In spite of our best efforts Ikigihk went astern of the Indian's craft by just about half a mile, our best motor speed being useless for trying to get closer. Sweeping on down the strait we could see the Indian still struggling with the fish. We went out of sight behind a distant low-lying island without our being able to see whether he ever got the fish aboard or not.
Due to the lateness of the season, and the amount of time we'd spent in Alaska, we encountered much unfavorable weather. For a week we sailed, or putt-putted in downpours of rain. We hunted and fished in the rain, camped in the rain, and literally lived in the rain, until we almost forgot what it felt like to be dry. When the sun did shine it was usually accompanied by high winds that took Igigihk southward under reefed sail like a migrating gossamer. (a migrating what?) If the rain stopped, and the wind blew, we were wet just the same - the only difference being that we were wet with salt spray instead of the rain.
For the sake of greater safety, and to help us keep our bearings through the seemingly interminable labyrinth of lace pattern waterways, we followed the commercial steamship lanes much of the time. But, when our charts showed we could save many miles of travel by taking short cuts back of islands, or through channels where only small boats could pass, we usually took the short cuts. In exploring some of these diminutive passages, however, where we found our charts none to accurate, we got lost so often that we lost so often that we lost all track of the number of times. Sometimes we'd be lost for a day or two, but we almost managed to turn up in the steamer lanes again - and invariably with a saving of many miles. There was a great thrill to getting lost occasionally, and picking our way through titanic water-canyons - many of them utterly unexplored, and off the beaten trail where travelers never get.
Ivory Island Lighthouse at the northwest entrance to Seaforth Channel
One experience in Seaforth Channel was typical of many others. We had been lost for about three days, and on the third day, without knowing exactly where we were on the map, we had jogged along for about 60 miles through a very narrow water-canyon where the walls of perpendicular rock rose to ice-capped heights some eight to ten thousand feet almost over our gunwales. A strong tide with which we'd been moving gave assurance we'd eventually pop out into the open waters again And, we did.
The narrow channel suddenly terminated into a monstrous bowl-like lake of salt water. Seventeen different water-canyons opened out of this lake like the spokes of a wagon wheel away from the hub. We wee racking our brains over the charts, trying to figure out which of the water trails we should take, when a steamer came bounding out of one of the holes on the north side of the lake. It was one of the Canadian Pacific passenger boats, and was going south. The steamer ate up the distance across the lake like a buzz-saw eats through a board. We shut down our motor, hove to, and watched the steamer. It got to the other side of the lake, and dived into one of the water-canyons, and out of sight, like a rat going home. We followed the ship and soon had our position verified on the charts.
Twenty days after we'd passed out of Alaskan waters we sped down the east coast of Vancouver Island on a mill race tide, rounded Fear Island Light House, and slipped into Victoria, provincial capital of British Columbia. We spent a week ashore there in this picturesque city, which is a bit of England set down in the new world. We had many friends there, and a glorious time. The Canadian Government liquor stores supplied the drinks - and it didn't taste like horse liniment or varnish remover either!! (Prohibition was still on in the US!) It was a wicked temptation to try to smuggle a few bottles of this stuff with the Canadian seals all over the corks, across the sounds into Seattle; but out of respect for American law we sailed from Victoria with Igigihk as alcoholically dry as old man Volstead himself. |
| Can you read the little note in the bottom corner? :-) |
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| 1929 |
The following day we sailed down the Washington shore to Seattle, and tied up at Colman Dock. It was within twenty minutes of time for the Federal customs House to close for the day. We hailed a taxi, and hurried thither to report our yacht in. When the necessary papers had been signed, e clerk said: "I'll phone Mr. Burton, one of the inspectors on the dock, and tell him you're on your way. If you hurry, you'll be able to get your boat cleared yet today."
Returning to the dock, the tide had reached low level, and Igigihk was riding about 25 feet below the deck of the wharf against a spider-legged assortment of tarry, oil-soaked pilings.
"Where's the yacht?" he exclaimed. "Where'd you come from in that peanutty little sea louse?"
"From Skayway, Alaska", we responded "and in from Canadian waters today."
This officer was diplomatic. He didn't come right out and ask me what relation I might be to Ananias - but, the look I got! Oh! That look!
The inspector then crept to the edge of the wharf, and took a squint down the greasy piliing which seemed to be the only route for making a closer inspection of the Igigihk and our cargo.
"What have you got in those bundles?" he asked.
"Just camping out", we replied.
"No booze, no drugs, no Chinamen?" queried the official. "Well, run along then." That doesn't look like a smuggler's outfit to me!"
The End
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