[Illustration: LOOKING BACK AT THE RINK RAPIDS.]
(Looking up the Yukon River from Von Wilczek Valley)]
We passed the mouth of the Nordenskiöld River on the afternoon of the 11th, and the same day our Indians told us of a perilous rapid ahead which the Indians of the country sometimes shot in their small rafts; but they felt very anxious in regard to our bulky vessel of forty-two feet in length, as the stream made a double sharp bend with a huge rock in the center. We started late on the morning of the 12th, and at 10 o'clock stopped our raft on the eastern bank in order to go ahead and inspect the rapids which we were about to shoot. I found them to be a contraction of the river bed, into about one-third its usual width of from four to six hundred yards, and that the stream was also impeded by a number of massive trap rocks, thirty to forty feet high, lying directly in the channel and dividing it into three or four well marked channels, the second from the east, being the one ordinarily used by the Indians. We rejected this, however, on account of a sharp turn in it which could not be avoided. These rapids were very picturesque, as they rushed between the fantastically formed trap rocks and high towers, two of which were united by a slender natural bridge of stone, that spanned a whirlpool, making the whole look like an old ruined stone bridge with but one arch that had withstood the general demolition. We essayed the extreme right-hand (eastern) passage, although it was quite narrow and its boiling current was covered with waves running two and three feet high, but being the straightest was the best for our long craft. Thousands of gulls had made the top of these isolated towers their breeding places, for nothing but winged life could ever reach them, and here, safe from all intrusion, they reared their young. As we shot by on the raft they rose in clouds and almost drowned the noise of the roaring waters with their shrill cries. This extreme right-hand channel through which we shot, could, I believe, be ascended by a light-draft river steamer provided with a steam windlass, a sharp bend in the river bank just before it is entered giving a short and secure hold for a cable rope; and if I am not too sanguine in my conjectures, the cascades below the Grand Cañon mark the head of navigation on the Yukon River, as already noted. I named this picturesque little rapid after Dr. Henry Rink, of Christiana, a well-known authority on Greenland. After the Yukon receives the many large tributaries mentioned, it spreads into quite a formidable magnitude; interspersed with many islands, all of which at their upper ends, are so loaded with great piles of driftwood, oftentimes fifteen to twenty feet high, as to make the vista in one of these archipelagoes quite different according as one looks up or down the river, the former resembling the picturesque Thousand Isles of the St. Lawrence, while the latter reveals only a dreary stretch of felled timber, lying in unpicturesque groups, with the bright green of the island foliage making the dreariness more conspicuous.