Beautiful, normally still Lituya Bay, on the coast of southeast Alaska, overran its banks on 9 July 1958, throwing its waters up in the highest wave known to oceanographers.
The highest wave yet known! Many seamen know of storm waves of thirty or forty feet—sometimes more. People on some exposed coasts have known tsunamis—seismic sea waves that can crash ashore as fifty-foot breakers. USS Ramapo measured a wave no less than 112 feet in height in a North Pacific area of long fetch after days of gales. But none of these have ever reared up as high as the surging mass of solid water that swept Lituya Bay that night in 1958.
It happened when the underlying rocks of the Fairweather Range broke under the strain of a crustal uplift going on in the region, producing a jolt that shook the world—one of the strongest earthquakes in North American history.
A crazy nightmare exploded over southeast Alaska’s hills and valleys. The peaks of the Fairweathers shivered visibly, and avalanches began their descent amid clouds of dust and flying snow. A hundred miles of alluvial soils in the coastal lowlands shook and danced, spawning sandboils, sulphur stenches, 30-foot geysers, and great cracks in the ground, one of which swallowed Clint Mortensen’s truck where it stood by his cabin on the Akwe River. A point of Khantaak Island, in Yakutat Bay, seemed to rise twenty feet, then it fell in a welter of churning waters, engulfing three strawberry pickers in a new sluiceway where some ninety feet of water began sweeping back and forth with the tides.
Boats at sea suffered unimaginable hammering. One man fishing twelve miles offshore said that despite a smooth sea he felt he was riding a big explosion—like jumping twelve feet out of the water. A frantic woman’s voice came over the radio, “My God, how much can our boat stand!” Another screamed, “We saw a whole mountain come down at Point Astrolabe!” But all this was nothing to what happened in Lituya Bay!
There were three boats anchored in the bay, but no one lives there. No one has since 1936 when fisherman Jim Huscroft quit after an inundation of his camp, fifty feet high on Cenotaph Island. Nor were there any campers on the shores, though but for the merest chance there might have been quite a number. They would not have lived out the night.
Lituya, with its perilous entrance, is the only shelter in a long stretch of forbidding coast—all the way from Cape Spencer to Yakutat Bay—and it is much used by fishermen. It is perfectly secluded among evergreen hills, with its head, six miles inland, joined to a fjord-like cross arm which runs behind the mountains toward two glacier fronts. Its shores abound with wild strawberries, and its waters are speckled with little glistening icebergs for the mariners’ iceboxes. The bay lies like an amphitheater before the magnificent backdrop of the 15,000-foot Fairweather Range and in quiet moments its fastnesses are cathedral-like with a serene majesty.
The seaward end of the bay is nearly closed by La Chaussee Spit, boulder-strewn and partly wooded. Just inside on the evening of 9 July, Bill Swanson and his wife were anchored in one boat and the Orville Wagners in another. Farther east in the bay was Howard Ulrich at anchor in Edrie with his seven-year-old son aboard. Ten Canadian mountaineers, just returned from the ascent of Mount Fairweather, had flown shortly before to Juneau, a day ahead of their schedule because of some weather worry of their RCAF pilot. Geologist Virgil Mann and a party of sixteen men were camped along the hills eight miles southeast of Lituya, preparing to move next morning to Jim Huscroft’s old cabin on the island near the middle of the Bay.
The occupants of the three boats jumped up in alarm to perceive the dancing of the mountains in the evening light and wondered what to do, when an incredible sight appeared. Like a mirage—but a terribly real and menacing one—the vast mass of Lituya Glacier rose into view beyond a high headland at the turn of the bay, great chunks falling from its face. The whole ominous mass finally plunged to the water to create a wave that went high over the headland, then caromed down the bay, scouring the trees from the hillsides and obliterating the mountaineers’ camp site. It rose in a watery mountain to overrun Cenotaph Island, where stood the empty cabin. It swirled Ulrich’s boat violently across the bay out of control and finally reached the other two boats with enough force to lift them high, snap their cables, and dash them in a kind of surfboard plunge completely across the spit to the sea outside, where they foundered. The Wagners were lost, but the Swansons escaped their wrecked boat in a tiny punt and lived to tell of their mad plunge over the tops of forty-foot trees and boulders that looked as big as houses.
The escape of Howard Ulrich was little less than miraculous, and his story will surely endure in the realms of sea lore. In a vivid account published in The Alaska Sportsman, he tells how he and his boy entered the bay on the last of the flood tide for rest after a day of fishing. He anchored Edrie in a cove on the south side a mile inside the entrance and after supper, he and Sonny went to sleep, only to be awakened by violent motions during the late Alaskan twilight. Jumping to the deck, Ulrich beheld the apparent writhing and twisting of the high peaks and the clouds of flying snow about their summits. Petrified, he watched for two minutes or more until his attention was attracted to a wall of water which he thought to be 1,800 feet high, erupting against the western mountain—the same headland above which Swanson had seen the looming ice of Lituya Glacier. The backwash came down the bay, cutting a swath through the trees on the summit of Cenotaph Island, lashing against the south shore to a height of 500 feet, then finally heading for Edrie as a 50-foot wave!
Suddenly he realized he had to move. Cursing himself for delaying, he got a lifejacket on Sonny, then somehow got the engine going, but he was unable to heave the anchor in time. Just before the water struck he veered the chain to its end, trying to slip it, at the same time maneuvering Edrie to face the wave. As she lifted to the swell the chain tightened and snapped, its short end whipping up and around the pilothouse. Out of control, the boat was swept over what had been dry land a moment before. By now Ulrich remembered his radio. Shouting into it, he indicated his despair, “Mayday! Mayday! Edrie in Lituya Bay—all hell broken loose—I think we’ve had it—good bye!”
But the wave, bouncing off the hillside, set Ulrich back toward the bay and allowed him, with strenuous efforts and doubtless superb seamanship, to get his boat under some kind of control. He now devoted himself to evading huge chunks of churning ice, any one of which could have made kindling wood of Edrie. The next problem was to get out of the hay through its tricky entrance—a passage bad enough at the height of the ebb, not to speak of the wildness of that particular moment. But the remotest chance of getting out looked mighty good to Ulrich just then!
He tucked pillows about Sonny and told him to hang on for dear life. A stroke of luck appeared a fellow fisherman, George Bockman, had become aware of the situation, and was taking station outside the channel to give Ulrich a guiding mark for his perilous run. Bracing himself, Ulrich headed for the biggest gamble of his life—a passage fatal even in its quieter moments for all too many fishermen. Ages later, it seemed, he was out. Three giant combers had broken over the tiny pilothouse, but Edrie was sturdy— she shivered and came through.
The tales of the survivors strain the credulity of oceanographers, and the actual height reached by the solid water remains a scientific puzzle. However, cataclysmic waves are no new thing in Lituya. Jean Franjois de Galoup, Compte de la Perouse, the discoverer of the bay in 1786, drew a sketch map showing two Indian villages of which no trace exists today. They were probably destroyed by a great wave in 1853 or 1854—there is no historical record other than a legend that several sea otter hunters escaped by being at sea in their canoes. Incidentally, Perouse lost two boats in the first of a long story of tragedies in Lituya’s entrance, after which he erected a monument to the memory of his lost men on the island now known as Cenotaph—where Huscroft lost his season’s salmon pack and nearly forfeited his life in 1936.
Don Miller of the U. S. Geological Survey noted some years ago that the trees about the shores of the bay grew in a remarkable pattern—in zones of uniform age bordered by trim-lines which he traced along the flanks of the hills at heights up to 400 feet above the bay. He took this to be evidence of past scouring of the slopes by high waves. There were two trim-lines, the younger of which corresponded clearly to the wave experienced in 1936 by Huscroft; the other, according to tree-ring studies, was in the winter of 1953-54.
Publication of these facts stirred up disbelief that any wave could reach such heights—especially among skeptical oceanographers and hydrographic surveyors, who thought they knew the power of the sea. Little did they know Lituya!
Criticism was in part based on the fact that neither of Miller’s trim-line dates had any record of nearby earthquakes. This was taken by Miller not to be a serious objection, since great waves can obviously result from landslides or icefalls, and these may occur for a variety of reasons other than earthquakes. Air photographs taken after 9 July showed that avalanches from as high as 3,000 feet, as well as tremendous masses of ice, fell into the bay. This created the wave that removed the forest, as can now be seen, in a swath up to 500 feet in height along the bay shores, and as high as 165 feet on the island. These heights dwarf those of Miller’s old trim-lines and might have ended the controversy about such fantastic wave heights, had it not been for the happenings at the western mountain, which were seen at the time of occurrence by the boatmen, and studied later by surveyors and photogrammetrists.
Miller was soon in the bay. He and other observers exclaimed in amazement—where the mountain had been tree-clad down to the shore, its steep bulwark now stood starkly bare to a height of more than 1,600 feet! The rocks seemed to be washed clean, as if in mute evidence of a sea that had climbed to that impossible height—greater than that of ten Niagaras! Miller accepted this theory and so did others, yet mass skepticism still persists. It seems impossible, but expert photogrammetrists of the Coast and Geodetic Survey, in compiling a new map of the bay from photographs taken by the Survey, are convinced that there was an actual flood to scour every crevice of the rocks so clean of dirt and debris. They are sure that the wave reached somewhere between the 1,200-foot level and the top of the bared mountainside.
It is no wonder that the fishermen in Lituya that night had their troubles. Bill Swanson and Howard Ulrich have not said whether they will ever again enter Lituya. The chances are that they will, however; fishermen and boatmen are like that.
Captain Roberts recently retired as Chief of the Division of Geophysics, U. S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, but was recalled as Special Assistant for Research and Development. During World War II he served as navigator, executive officer, and commanding officer of various Coast and Geodetic Survey ships on hydrographic and geodetic surveys in the Aleutian Islands. He is the author of numerous professional articles in the field of geophysics and surveying.