arctic bend.

Owing to this, they now found themselves confronted by the hardest kind
of sledging over rough hummocky ice that was often piled in chaotic
ridges twenty and thirty feet high. As the river freezes first at its
most northerly point, and this belt of solid ice is gradually extended
south, or back toward its source, the floating cakes of its upper
reaches, borne by the swift current, are piled on the ever-advancing
barrier in confused masses that stretch across the river like windrows.

In the spring, when the ice breaks up and is hurled irresistibly down
stream on the swollen current, the same effect is reproduced on a vastly
increased scale. Then the upper river breaks first, and a sudden rise of
water from some great tributary starts the ice over the still solid
barrier below. The huge cakes slide, jam, push, and crash over the still
unbroken ice sheet, until they are piled in a vast gleaming mass seventy
or eighty feet in height, from a quarter of a mile to one mile in
length, and extending from bank to bank.

This mighty gorge must give way at length, and when it does it goes with
a roaring fury that is terrifying and grand beyond description. After
grinding and tearing onward for several miles, or perhaps less than one,
the furious impulse is again checked by another solid barrier, which
must in turn be broken down and swept away, its added weight giving
increased energy to the mighty force.

So the ice crashes its resistless way down the whole Yukon Valley to
Bering Sea, two thousand miles distant, sweeping everything before it,
mowing down vast areas of forest, submerging islands, tearing out banks,
and leaving everywhere traces of its terrible progress in the shape of
huge ice cakes, weighing many tons, stranded high above ordinary water
level.

Although Phil Ryder and his companions were not to witness this grand
exhibition of one of nature's mightiest forces, they were sadly
inconvenienced and delayed by the uncomfortable fashion in which their
frozen highway had been constructed some months earlier. If they could
have left the river and followed along its banks, they would have done
so; but this was out of the question, not only on account of their
rugged character, but because on their timbered portions the snow lay
many feet in depth, while from the river it had been so blown by strong
north winds that for long stretches the ice was barely covered. This
enabled the sledge men to walk withou