I would add a fifth, sunset at sea. Earth holds nothing more fair, nothing more beautiful than sunshine.
A little while ago the sky was blue, flaked with fleecy white clouds, the snows on the coast range lay sparkling like diamonds in the sun, the forest lay dark and green on the mountainside, the sea gray and blue by turns; but now a change comes over nature’s moods, the clouds glow, the snows take on brilliant hues, the dark old forest grows darker, the sea shimmers and sparkles, a flaming molten mass.
The imperial sunset throws its red flame afar, ’till the land, the sea, the mountains, the sky, the very air it incarnadines in one grand flame of scarlet. Long, long will the beholder remember that glorious sunset at Sitka.
A friend of the writer who owns mines at Cook’s Inlet thus describes his voyage north along the coast to Unalaska:
We were now aboard the Excelsior. About noon the next day we put out to sea and saw no more island passages such as we had seen while aboard the Queen.
Our first stop was at Yakutat, an Indian village on the Yakutat Bay. This bay is only an indentation of the coast, curving inward for about twenty miles. The whole force of the Pacific sweeps into it. Landing is both difficult and dangerous. In the bay are always many icebergs from the glaciers at its head.
Great excitement prevailed here in 1880 when gold was discovered in the black sand beaches. The rotary hand amalgamators were used and as much as forty dollars per day to the man was often realized. The miners, however, had reckoned without their host; the Yakutat chief, who suddenly developed financial ability worthy of his white brother, exacted licenses and royalties from the miners.
This black sand mine was not yet exhausted when a tidal wave heaped the coast with fish. These decayed in the hot sun and the oil soaked down into the sand. The mercury would not work and the miners moved to a new beach, but again a tidal wave ruined the mines by washing all the black sand out to sea. Yakutat was then deserted by the miners. The Indian women of this village are the finest basket weavers in Alaska.
Soon after leaving Yakutat we sighted Mt. St. Elias and the Malispania glacier. The Indians call it Bolshoi Shopka--great one. This snow-clad mountain, nearly four miles high, beautiful as Valaskjalf, the silver roofed mansion of Odin, is a most magnificent sight. Such grandeur, such solidity, such poetry of color,--the white peak kisses the blue heaven,--such solitude. Like the golden few of earth’s great ones, it stands alone, isolated by its very greatness.