All in the timing
Unloading AK-Disco kleppers on an end-moraine at the T in Ford’s Terror. Yosemite-sheer walls leave few places for humans to camp, and for critters to forage. Granite tends to exacerbate conflict between recreation and wildlife, such as yatseeneit. ● So, when was this morainal bar formed? Sure, it has the unmistakable curvature and bathymetric setting of a tidewater icefront-dump. But was it formed by advance of the Brown Remnant in the Little Ice Age, only 3 centuries ago? Or WAY longer back into waning millennia of the Great Ice Age? Younger Dryas maybe? My 1994 journal toyed with these questions, and I’ll have to confess; my understanding hasn’t advanced a whole lot over the intervening quarter century. ● For now, though, I’m sticking with page 5 of the ’94 journal; it’s a Little Ice Age terminal.
In days before accurate tide tables, this place would indeed have gotten your attention. The ‘cultural atlas,’ Thornton & Martin, eds (2012) gives us no Lingít name, so for now I’ll grudgingly employ the colonial one, which certainly has cachet and name recognition. And at least Ford—Master-of-Arms, USN, 1889—had an actual experience here, so the name is place-based as well as what Bureau of Geographic Names calls “commemorative.” I wonder, though, were the S’it’ḵweidí as cowed by this place as invading arms-masters were?
My only experience in this fiord was back in mid-August 1994, helping my then-partner-now-wife Cathy Pohl guide an Alaska Discovery kayak trip. Fast forward 28 years to autumn, 2022, when I’m hoping to vicariously ‘ride-along’ with a friends’ trip, spun off from the course I’m co-teaching with geologist Cathy Connor. Hopefully this journal will assist their sleuthing and provide a little background.
