traveled, one that came to Cimarron near by Court-House Rock.
Recrossing the river on a fallen log, I lay down to sleep beneath a
shelving rock with a roaring fire before me, sleeping soundly and
deeply until the crash of an overturned cliff awakened me. Jumping to
my feet, I found the storm over with the clouds broken and drifting
back and forth in two strata as though undecided whether to go or
remain. Above a low, lazy cloud, I caught a glimpse of Turret-Top, and
turning, beheld Court-House Rock.
The foot gave no pain as I limped along the trail I had so often
followed. Now and then I turned to take a photograph. The stars and
the lights in the village were just appearing when I limped into the
surgeon's office in Ridgway.
The Maker of Scenery and Soil
The Maker of Scenery and Soil
During my first boyish exploring trip in the Rocky Mountains I was
impressed with the stupendous changes which the upper slope of these
mountains had undergone. In places were immense embankments and wild
deltas of débris that plainly had come from elsewhere. In other places
the rough edges of the cañons and ridges had been trimmed and
polished; their cliffs and projections were gone and their surfaces
had been swept clean of all loose material. Later, I tried vainly to
account for some cañon walls being trimmed and polished at the bottom
while their upper parts were jagged. In most cañons the height of the
polishings above the bottom was equal on both walls, with the upper
edge of the polish even or level for the entire length of the cañon.
In one cañon, in both floor and walls, were deep lateral scratches in
the rocks.
One day I found some polished boulders perched like driftwood on the
top of a polished rock dome; they were porphyry, while the dome was
flawless granite. They plainly had come from somewhere else. How they
managed to be where they were was too much for me. Mountain floods
were terrible but not wild enough in their fiercest rushes to do this.
Upon a mountainside across a gorge about two miles distant, and a
thousand feet above the perched boulders on the dome, I found a
porphyry outcrop; but this situation only added to my confusion. I did
not then know of the glacial period, or the actions of glaciers. It
was a delightful revelation when John Muir told me of these wonders.
Much of the earth's surface, together with most mountain-ranges, have
gone through a glacial period or periods. There is extensive and
varied evidence that the greater portion of the earth has been carved
and extensively changed by the Ice King. Substantial works, blurred
and broken records, and impressive ruins in wide array over the earth
show long and active possession by the Ice King, as eloquently as the
monumental ruins in the Seven Hills tell of their intense association
with man.
Both the northern and the southern hemispheres have had their heavy,
slow-going floods of ice that appear to have swept from the polar
world far toward the equator. During the great glacial period, which
may have lasted for ages, a mountainous flood of ice overspread
America from the north and extended far down the Mississippi Valley.
This ice may have been a mile or more in depth. It utterly changed the
topography and made a new earth. Lakes were filled and new ones made.
New landscapes were formed: mountains were rubbed down to plains,
morainal hills were built upon plains, and streams were moved bodily.
It is probable that during the last ice age the location and course of
both the Ohio and the Missouri Rivers were changed. Originally the
Missouri flowed east and north, probably emptying into a lake that had
possession of the Lake Superior territory. The Ice King deliberately
shoved this river hundreds of miles toward the south. The Ohio
probably had a similar experience. These rivers appear to mark the
"Farthest South" of the ice; their position probably was determined by
the ice. Had a line been traced on the map along the ragged edge and
front of the glacier at its maximum extension, this line would almost
answer for the present position of the Missouri and Ohio Rivers.
The most suggestive and revealing words concerning glaciers that I
have ever read are these of John Muir in "The Mountains of
California": "When we bear in mind that all the Sierra forests are
young, growing upon moraine soil recently deposited, and that the
flank of the range itself, with all its landscapes, is new-born,
recently sculptured, and brought to light of day from beneath the ice
mantle of the glacial winter, then a thousand lawless mysteries
disappear and broad harmonies take their places."
"A glacier," says Judge Junius Henderson, in the best definition that
I have heard, "is a body of ice originating in an area where the
annual accumulation of snow exceeds the dissipation, and moving
downward and outward to an area where dissipation exceeds
accumulation."
[Illustration: THE HALLETT GLACIER]
A glacier may move forward only a few feet in a year or it may move
several feet in a day. It may be only a few hundred feet in length,
or, as during the Ice Age, have an area of thousands of square miles.
The Arapahoe Glacier moves slowly, as do all small glaciers and some
large ones. One year's measured movement was 27.7 feet near the centre
and 11.15 near the edge. This, too, is about the average for one year,
and also an approximate movement for most small mountain glaciers. The
centre of the glacier, meeting less resistance than the edges,
commonly flows much more rapidly. The enormous Alaskan glaciers have a
much more rapid flow, many moving forward five or more feet a day.
A glacier is the greatest of eroding agents. It wears away the surface
over which it flows. It grinds mountains to dust, transports soil and
boulders, scoops out lake-basins, gives flowing lines to landscapes.
Beyond comprehension we are indebted to them for scenery and soil.
Glaciers, or ice rivers, make vast changes. Those in the Rocky
Mountains overthrew cliffs, pinnacles, and rocky headlands. These in
part were crushed and in part they became embedded in the front,
bottom, and sides of the ice. This rock-set front tore into the sides
and bottom of its channel--after it had made a channel!--with a
terrible, rasping, crushing, and grinding effect, forced irresistibly
forward by a pressure of untold millions of tons. Glaciers, large and
small, the world over, have like characteristics and influences. To
know one glacier will enable one to enjoy glaciers everywhere and to
appreciate the stupendous influence they have had upon the surface of
the earth.
They have planed down the surface and even reduced mountain-ridges to
turtle outlines. In places the nose of the glacier was thrust with
such enormous pressure against a mountainside that the ice was forced
up the slope which it flowed across and then descended on the opposite
side. Sustained by constant and measureless pressure, years of fearful
and incessant application of this weighty, flowing, planing, ploughing
sandpaper wore the mountain down. In time, too, the small
ragged-edged, V-shaped ravines became widened, deepened, and extended
into enormous U-shaped glaciated gorges.
Glaciers have gouged or scooped many basins in the solid rock. These
commonly are made at the bottom of a deep slope where the descending
ice bore heavily on the lever or against a reverse incline. The size
of the basin thus made is determined by the size, width, and weight of
the glacier and by other factors. In the Rocky Mountains these
excavations vary in size from a few acres to a few thousand. They
became lake-basins on the disappearance of the ice.
More than a thousand lakes of glacial origin dot the upper portions of
the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. Most of these are above the altitude
of nine thousand feet, and the largest, Grand Lake, is three miles in
length. Landslides and silt have filled many of the old glacier lake
basins, and these, overgrown with grass and sedge, are called glacier
meadows.
Vast was the quantity of material picked up and transported by these
glaciers. Mountains were moved piecemeal, and ground to boulders,
pebbles, and rock-flour in the moving. In addition to the material
which the glacier gathered up and excavated, it also carried the
wreckage brought down by landslides and the eroded matter poured upon
it by streams from the heights. Most of the material which falls upon
the top of the upper end of the glacier ultimately works its way to
the bottom, where, with the other gathered material, it is pressed
against the bottom and sides and used as a cutting or grinding tool
until worn to a powder or pebbles.
Train-loads of débris often accumulate upon the top of the glacier. On
the lower course this often is a hundred feet or more above the
surface, and as the glacier descends and shrivels, enormous quantities
of this rocky débris fall off the sides and, in places, form enormous
embankments; these often closely parallel long stretches of the
glacier like river levees.
The large remainder of the material is carried to the end of the
glacier, where the melting ice unloads and releases it. This
accumulation, which corresponds to the delta of a river, is the
terminal moraine. For years the bulk of the ice may melt away at
about the same place; this accumulates an enormous amount of débris;
an advance of the ice may plough through this and repile it, or the
retreat of the ice or a changed direction of its flow may pile the
débris elsewhere and over wide areas. Many of these terminal moraines
are an array of broken embankments, small basin-like holes and smooth,
level spaces. The débris of these moraines embraces rock-flour,
gravel, pebbles, a few angular rock-masses, and enormous quantities of
many-sized boulders,--rocks rounded by the grind of the glacial mill.
Strange freight, of unknown age, these creeping ice rivers bring down.
One season the frozen carcass of a mountain sheep was taken from the
ice at the end of the Arapahoe Glacier. If this sheep fell into a
crevasse at the upper end of the glacier, its carcass probably had
been in the ice for more than a century. Human victims, too, have been
strangely handled by glaciers. It appears that in 1820 Dr. Hamil and a
party of climbers were struck by a snowslide on the slope of Mont
Blanc. One escaped with his life, while the others were swept down
into a crevasse and buried so deeply in the snow and ice that their
bodies could not be recovered. Scientists said that at the rate the
glacier was moving it would give up its dead after forty years. Far
down the mountain forty-one years afterward, the ice gave up its
victims. A writer has founded on this incident an interesting story,
in which the bodies are recovered in an excellent state of
preservation, and an old woman with sunken cheeks and gray hair clasps
the youthful body of her lover of long ago, the guide.
Where morainal débris covers thousands of acres, it is probable that
valuable mineral veins were in some cases covered, prospecting
prevented, and mineral wealth lost; but on the other hand, the erosion
done by the glacier, often cutting down several hundred feet, has in
many cases uncovered leads which otherwise probably would have been
left buried beyond search. Then, too, millions of dollars of placer
gold have been washed from moraines.
In addition to the work of making and giving the mountains flowing
lines of beauty, the glaciers added inconceivably to the richness of
the earth's resources by creating vast estates of soil. It is probable
that glaciers have supplied one half of the productive areas of the
earth with soil; the mills of the glaciers have ground as much
rock-flour--soil--for the earth as wind, frost, heat, and rain,--all
the weathering forces. This flour and other coarser glacial grindings
were quickly changed by the chemistry of Nature into plant-food,--the
staff of life for forests and flowers.
Glaciers have not only ground the soil but in many places have carried
this and spread it out hundreds of miles from the place where the
original raw rocks were obtained. Wind and water have done an enormous
amount of work sorting out the soil in moraines and, leaving the
boulders behind, this soil was scattered and sifted far and wide to
feed the hungry plant-life.
At last the Glacial Winter ended, and each year more snow melted and
evaporated than fell. Snow-line retreated up the slopes and finally
became broken, even in the heights. To-day, in the Rockies, there are
only a dozen or so small glaciers, mere fragments of the once great
ice cap which originally covered deeply all the higher places and
slopes, and extended unbroken for hundreds of miles, pierced strangely
with a few sharp peaks.
The small remaining glaciers in the Rocky Mountains lie in sheltered
basins or cirques in the summits and mostly above the altitude of
thirteen thousand feet. These are built and supplied by the winds
which carry and sweep snow to them from off thousands of acres of
treeless, barren summits. The present climate of these mountains is
very different from what it was ages ago. Then for a time the annual
snowfall was extremely heavy. Each year the sun and the wind removed
only a part of the snow which fell during the year. This icy remainder
was added to the left-over of preceding years until the accumulation
was of vast depth and weight.
On the summit slopes this snow appears to have been from a few hundred
to a few thousand feet deep. Softened from the saturation of melting
and compressed from its own weight, it became a stratum of ice. This
overlay the summit of the main ranges, and was pierced by only a few
of the higher, sharper peaks which were sufficiently steep to be
stripped of snow by snowslides and the wind.
The weight of this superimposed icy stratum was immense; it
was greater than the bottom layers could support. Ice is
plastic--rubbery--if sufficient pressure or weight be applied. Under
the enormous pressure the bottom layers started to crawl or flow from
beneath like squeezed dough. This forced mass moved outward and
downward in the direction of the least resistance,--down the slope.
Thus a glacier is conceived and born.
Numbers of these glaciers--immense serpents and tongues of
ice--extended down the slopes, in places miles beyond the line of
perpetual snow. Some of these were miles in length, a thousand or more
feet wide, and hundreds of feet deep, and they forced and crushed
their way irresistibly. It is probable they had a sustained,
continuous flow for centuries.
A glacier is one of the natural wonders of the world and well might
every one pay a visit to one of these great earth-sculpturers. The
time to visit a glacier is during late summer, when the snows of the
preceding winter are most completely removed from the surface. With
the snows removed, the beauty of the ice and its almost stratified
make-up are revealed. The snow, too, conceals the yawning
_bergschlunds_ and the dangerous, splendid crevasses. A visit to one
of these ponderous, patient, and effective monsters is not without
danger; concealed crevasses, or thinly covered icy caverns, or
recently deposited and insecurely placed boulders on the moraines are
potent dangers that require vigilance to avoid. However, the careful
explorer will find one of these places far safer than the city's
chaotic and crowded street.
[Illustration: A CREVASSE]
For the study of old glacier records few places can equal the Estes
Park district in Colorado. The Arapahoe, on Arapahoe Peak, Colorado,
is an excellent glacier to visit. It is characteristic and is easy of
access. It is close to civilization,--within a few miles of a
railroad,--is comprehensively situated, and is amid some of the
grandest scenery in the Rocky Mountains. It has been mapped and studied,
and its rate of movement and many other things concerning it are
accurately known. It is the abstract and brief chronicle of the Ice
Age, a key to all the glacier ways and secrets.
In the Arapahoe Glacier one may see the cirque in which the snow is
deposited or drifted by the wind; and the bergschlund-yawn--crack of
separation--made by glacier ice where it moves away from the névé or
snowy ice above. In walking over the ice in summer one may see or
descend into the crevasses. These deep, wide cracks, miniature cañons,
are caused by the ice flowing over inequalities in the surface. At the
end of this glacier one may see the terminal moraine,--a raw, muddy
pile of powdered, crushed, and rounded rocks. Farther along down the
slope one may see the lakes that were made, the rocks that were
polished, and the lateral moraine deposited by the glacier in its
bigger days,--times when the Ice King almost conquered the earth.
In the Rocky Mountains the soil and morainal débris were transported
only a few miles, while the Wisconsin and Iowa glaciers brought
thousands of acres of rich surfacing, now on the productive farms of
Ohio, Illinois, and Iowa, from places hundreds of miles to the north
in Canada. In the Rocky Mountains most of the forests are growing in
soil or moraines that were ground and distributed by glaciers. Thus
the work of the glaciers has made the earth and the mountains far more
useful in addition to giving them gentler influences,--charming lakes
and flowing landscape lines. It is wonderful that the mighty worker
and earth-shaper, the Ice King, should have used snowflakes for
edge-tools, millstones, and crushing stamps!
To know the story of the Ice King--to be able to understand and
restore the conditions that made lakes and headlands, moraines and
fertile fields--will add mightily to the enjoyment of a visit to the
Rocky Mountains, the Alps, the coasts and mountains of Norway and New
England, Alaska's unrivaled glacier realm, or the extraordinary ice
sculpturing in the Yosemite National Park.
Edward Orton, Jr., formerly State Geologist of Ohio, who spent weeks
toiling over and mapping the Mills Moraine on the east slope of Long's
Peak, gave a glimpse of what one may feel and enjoy from nature
investigation in his closing remarks concerning this experience. He
said, "If one adds to the physical pleasures of mountaineering, the
intellectual delight of looking with the seeing eye, of explaining,
interpreting, and understanding the gigantic forces which have wrought
these wonders; if by these studies one's vision may be extended past
the sublime beauties of the present down through the dim ages of the
past until each carved and bastioned peak tells a romance above words;
if by communion with this greatness, one's soul is uplifted and
attuned into fuller accord with the great cosmic forces of which we
are the higher manifestation, then mountaineering becomes not a
pastime but an inspiration."
A Rainy Day at the Stream's Source
A Rainy Day at the Stream's Source
To spend a day in the rain at the source of a stream was an experience
I had long desired, for the behavior of the waters in collecting and
hurrying down slopes would doubtless show some of Nature's interesting
ways. On the Rockies no spot seemed quite so promising as the
watershed on which the St. Vrain made its start to the sea. This had
steep and moderate slopes, rock ledges, and deep soil; and about one
half of its five thousand acres was covered with primeval forest,
while the remainder had been burned almost to barrenness by a fierce
forest fire. Here were varied and contrasting conditions to give many
moods to the waters, and all this display could easily be seen during
one active day.
June was the month chosen, since in the region of the St. Vrain that
is the rainiest part of the year. After thoroughly exploring the
ground I concluded to go down the river a few miles and make
headquarters in a new sawmill. There I spent delightful days in
gathering information concerning tree-growth and in making
biographical studies of several veteran logs, as the saw ripped open
and revealed their life-scrolls.
One morning I was awakened by the pelting and thumping of large,
widely scattered raindrops on the roof of the mill. Tree stories were
forgotten, and I rushed outdoors. The sky was filled with the
structureless gloom of storm-cloud, and the heavy, calm air suggested
rain. "We'll get a wetting such as you read of, to-day!" declared the
sawmill foreman, as I made haste to start for the wilds.
I plunged into the woods and went eagerly up the dim, steep mountain
trail which kept close company with the river St. Vrain. Any doubts
concerning the strength of the storm were quickly washed away. My
dry-weather clothes were swiftly soaked, but with notebook safe under
my hat, I hastened to gain the "forks" as soon as possible, enjoying
the general downpour and the softened noise that it made through the
woods. I had often been out in rains on the Rockies, but this one was
wetting the earth with less effort than any I had ever experienced.
For half an hour no air stirred; then, while crossing a small
irregular opening in the woods, I was caught in a storm-centre of
wrangling winds and waters, and now and then their weight would almost
knock me over, until, like a sapling, I bowed, streaming, in the
storm. The air was full of "water-dust," and, once across the open, I
made haste to hug a tree, hoping to find a breath of air that was not
saturated to strangulation.
Neither bird nor beast had been seen, nor did I expect to come upon
any, unless by chance my movements drove one from its refuge; but
while I sat on a sodden log, reveling in elemental moods and sounds, a
water-ouzel came flying along. He alighted on a boulder which the
on-sweeping stream at my feet seemed determined to drown or dislodge,
and, making his usual courtesies, he began to sing. His melody is
penetrating; but so sustained was the combined roar of the stream and
the storm that there came to me only a few notes of his energetic
nesting-time song. His expressive attitudes and gestures were so
harmoniously united with these, however, that I could not help feeling
that he was singing with all his might to the water, the woods, and
me.
Keeping close to the stream, I continued my climb. My ear now caught
the feeble note of a robin, who was making discouraged and
disconsolate efforts at song, and it seemed to issue from a throat
clogged with wet cotton. Plainly the world was not beautiful to him,
and the attempt at music was made to kill time or cheer himself up.
The robin and the ouzel,--how I love them both, and yet how utterly
unlike they are! The former usually chooses so poor a building-site,
anchors its nest so carelessly, or builds so clumsily, that the
precious contents are often spilled or the nest discovered by some
enemy. His mental make-up is such that he is prone to predict the
worst possible outcome of any new situation. The ouzel, on the other
hand, is sweet and serene. He builds his nest upon a rock and tucks
it where search and sharp eyes may not find it. He appears indifferent
to the comings and goings of beast or man, enjoys all weathers, seems
entranced with life, and may sing every day of the year.
Up in the lower margin of the Engelmann spruce forest the wind now
ceased and the clouds began to conserve their waters. The territory
which I was about to explore is on the eastern summit slopes of the
Rockies, between the altitudes of ninety-five hundred and twelve
thousand feet. Most of these slopes were steep, and much of the soil
had a basis of disintegrated granite. The forested and the treeless
slopes had approximately equal areas, and were much alike in regard to
soil, inclination, and altitude, while the verdure of both areas
before the forest fire had been almost identical. The St. Vrain is
formed by two branches flowing northeasterly and southeasterly, the
former draining the treeless area and the latter the forested one.
Below the junction, the united waters sweep away through the woods,
but at it, and a short distance above, the fire had destroyed every
living thing.