OVERFLOW" ICE]

We found overflow almost as soon as we reached the Chatanika River, and
in one form or another we encountered it during all the two days and a
half that we were pursuing the river's windings. At times it was covered
with a sheet of new ice that would support the dogs but would not
support the sled, so that the dogs were travelling on one level and the
sled on another, and a man had to walk along in the water between the
dogs and the sled for several hundred yards at a time, breaking down the
overflow ice with his feet.

At other times the thin sheets of overflow ice would sway and bend as
the sled passed quickly over them in a way that gives to ice in such
condition its Alaskan name of "rubber-ice," while for the fifteen or
twenty miles of McManus Creek, the headwaters of the Chatanika, we had
continuous stretches of fine glare ice with enough frost crystals upon
it from condensing moisture to give a "tooth" to the dogs' feet, just as
varnish on a photographic negative gives tooth to the retouching pencil.
Perfectly smooth ice is a very difficult surface for dogs to pass over;
glare ice slightly roughened by frost deposit makes splendid, fast
going.

Eighty-five miles or so from Fairbanks, and just about half-way to
Circle, the watercourse is left and the first summit is the
"Twelve-Mile," as it is called. We tried hard to take our load up at one
trip, but found it impossible to do so, and had to unlash the sled and
take half the load at a time, caching it on the top while we returned
for the other half.

It took us half a day to get our load to the top of the Twelve-Mile
summit, a rise of about one thousand three hundred feet from the creek
bed as the aneroid gave it. In the steeper pitches we had to take the
axe and cut steps, so hard and smooth does the incessant wind at these
heights beat the snow, and on our second trip to the top we were just in
time to rescue a roll of bedding that had been blown from the cache and
was about to descend a gully from which we could hardly have recovered
it.

This summit descended, we were in Birch Creek water, and had we followed
the watercourse would have reached the Yukon; but we would have
travelled hundreds of miles and would have come out below Fort Yukon,
while we were bound for Circle City. So there was another and a yet more
difficult summit to cross before we could descend the Yukon slope. We
were able to hire a man and two dogs to help us over the Ea