Abstract
MR. DOUGLAS W. FRESHFIELD publishes, in the April number of the Geographical Journal an account of his expedition to Kangchenjunga during the autumn of 1899. The Kangchenjunga group is cut off from the mountains of Nepal by the Khosi Valley on the west, and from the mountains of Bhotan by the Teesta Valley on the east. By crossing the lofty spur which unites it to the Thibetan highlands, it is just possible to get the mountain without trenching on territory offi cially recognised as Thibetan. Mr. Freshfield's object was to make this high-level tour round Kangchenjunga, passing as near as possible to the great mountain, and, further, to obtain some accurate idea of the glacial features of the group. Progress was greatly interfered with during the earlier part of the journey by the storm which caused so much damage at Darjiling and by the lowering of the snow-line which resulted from it; but the tour was successfully accomplished, and from the head of the valley of the Kangchen, in Nepal, Europeans looked for the first time on the north-west face of Kangchenjunga, “not a sheer cliff like the three other aspects of the peak, but a superb pile of rock buttresses, terraces of snow and staircases of ice, through whose labyrinthine complexities the future conquerors of the mountain will have to find the least hazardous way to the summit.” Concerning the Kangchenjunga glaciers, Mr. Fresh-field says, “Four glaciers radiate from the peak, pointing roughly to the north-east, south-east, north-west and south west. Those are the Zemu Glacier, eighteen miles long, and the Talung Glacier, both draining to the Teesta, the Kangchen Glacier, fifteen miles long, and Yalung Glacier, both draining to the Arun and the Khosi. The forked spurs that protrude south and west from Kangchenjunga, dominated respectively by Kabru and Jannu, enclose in the first case the Alukthang glaciers, united not long ago in a single stream and now divided by little more than their moraines, and the southern glaciers of Kabru, which fall into a separate glen; in the second case, three considerable ice-streams, one of which almost meets the Kangchen Glacier at its lower extremity, the second builds across the valley, out of the rockfalls of the tremendous cliffs of ! Jannu which encompass its source, a remarkable wall of moraine stuff, similar to those of the Allalein, or the Brenva in the Alps, while a third fills a glen the stream from which joins the Kangchen torrent at Khunza.”
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The Glaciers of Kangchenjunga . Nature 66, 19–20 (1902). https://doi.org/10.1038/066019a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/066019a0