| Alaska, 1979 | |
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"La Perouse was a French explorer of the late 1700s who stayed at Lituya Bay for three months. He lost 24 men in a boating accident in the bay, and built a monument on Cenotaph Island, now probably washed away. I learned that the catastrophic wave of 1958 was the fifth landslide-triggered wave there since 1840. The last one wiped out all traces of the earlier ones."
The entrance to Lituya Bay is a narrow opening in the moraine that forms the lowlands in front. The portion on the left side is called Solomon Railroad. Directly behind it is Cascade Glacier, whose toe is at the head of Lituya Bay. The headland in the center of the view released a large rockslide after a 1958 earthquake, causing a gigantic tsunami that swept out of the bay, washing two fishing boats right over the barrier at the bay's mouth.
