The Best Preserved And Most Regular Of The Moraines Are Two Laterals
About Two Hundred Feet In Height And Two
Miles long, extending from
the foot of a magnificent canyon valley on the north side of the
mountain and trending
First in a northerly direction, then curving
around to the west, while a well-characterized terminal moraine,
formed by the glacier towards the close of its existence, unites them
near their lower extremities at a height of eighty-five hundred feet.
Another pair of older lateral moraines, belonging to a glacier of
which the one just mentioned was a tributary, extend in a general
northwesterly direction nearly to the level of Big Smoky Valley, about
fifty-five hundred feet above sea level.
Four other canyons, extending down the eastern slopes of this grand
old mountain into Monito Valley, are hardly less rich in glacial
records, while the effects of the mountain shadows in controlling and
directing the movements of the residual glaciers to which all these
phenomena belonged are everywhere delightfully apparent in the trends
of the canyons and ridges, and in the massive sculpture of the neve
wombs at their heads. This is a very marked and imposing mountain,
attracting the eye from a great distance. It presents a smooth and
gently curved outline against the sky, as observed from the plains,
and is whitened with patches of enduring snow. The summit is made up
of irregular volcanic tables, the most extensive of which is about two
and a half miles long, and like the smaller ones is broken abruptly
down on the edges by the action of the ice.
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