From introduction: The history of glaciation in Alaska offers a fascinating field for study. Because of the remarkable development and easy accessibility of valley and piedmont glaciers in the coastal mountains, Alaska has long been popularly conceived as a land of ice and snow, a concept that is only slowly being corrected. To the student of glaciation, however, Alaska affords a unique opportunity to observe the formation, movement, and dissipation of the many living glaciers, to examine the results of glacial erosion on a gigantic scale, and to discover and work out the sequence of Pleistocene events as shown by the topographic forms in both glaciated and unglaciated areas and by the deposits left by ice and water during earlier stages of glaciation.