Natural Rock Face

This natural face-shaped rock is located near Sumdum glacier in Alaska's Wrangell-Petersburg Census Area. Best viewed by boat. Sumdum glacier is in the background. John Muir's observation of the bay and rocks of Sumdum: "Domes swell against the sky in fine lines as lofty and as perfect in form as those of the California valley, and rock-fronts stand forward, as sheer and as nobly sculptured. No ice-work that I have ever seen surpasses this, either in the magnitude of the features or effectiveness of composition.On some of the narrow benches and tables of the walls rows of spruce trees and two-leaved pines were growing..." The first paying gold strikes in Alaska were in Windham Bay, just south of Endicott Arm, and at Powers Creek, at the base of Endicott's Sumdum Glacier. It was 1869 - just two years after Russia sold Alaska to the U.S. - and it signaled the beginning of the gold rushes that would draw thousands of miners northward, eventually settling in communities like Juneau and Skagway and flooding the Klondike trails into the Yukon. Unfortunately, not much is known about the Sumdum people. With the opening of the mines, they either relocated to the new town or left the area. The last known person of Sumdum origin died in the 1940s. Even the meaning of the Sumdum name remains a mystery, although some believe "The People of the Sparkling Green Water" is a likely possibility.