The Sitkan district is essentially one of rugged inequality, being mountainous on the mainland to the exclusion of all other features, and equally so on the islands. It is traversed here, there and everywhere by broad arms of the sea and their hundreds and thousands of lesser channels.
Land travel is simply impracticable. Nobody goes on a road; savages and whites all travel by the water. Perhaps the greatest humidity and the heaviest rainfall in the Alaskan country occur here. The equable and hot rigorous climate permits of free navigation at all seasons of the year, and it is seldom, indeed, that the little lakes and shallow lagoons near the sea-level are frozen so firmly as to allow of a winter's skating.
The Aleutian and Kadiak districts are quite as peculiar in themselves and as much individualized by their geological age and formation as is the Sitkan division. They hold within their boundaries a range of great fire-mountains--grumbling, smoking, quaking hills; some of these volcanic peaks being so lofty and so impressive as to fix in the explorer's eye an image superb and grand, and so magnificent as to render adequate description impossible. Like the Sitkan district, the Aleutian and Kadiak regions are exceedingly mountainous, there being very little low or level land compared with the sum total of their superficial area; but in that portion extending for 1,100 miles to the westward of Kadiak, nearly over to Asia, bare of timber, a skeleton, as it were, is presented to the eye and strikes one with a sense of an individuality here in decided contrast with that of the Sitkan country. The hills not clothed with timber are covered to their summits in most cases with a thick crop of circumpolar sphagnum, interspersed with grasses, and a large flora, bright and beautiful in the summer season. To thoroughly appreciate how much moisture in the form of fog and rain settles upon the land, one cannot do better than to leave the ship in the harbor, or the post where he is stationed, and take up a line of march through one of the narrow valleys near by to the summit of one of the lofty peaks. He will step upon what appeared from the window of the vessel a firm greensward, and sink to his waist in a shaking, tremulous bog, or slide over moss-grown shingle, painted and concealed by the luxuriant growth of cryptogamic life, where he expected to find a free and ready path.