Here
The Rocky Mountain Spruce Forms The Bulk Of The Forest.
The cones
were ripe; most of them had shed their winged seeds, and the shell-like scales were conspicuously spread, making rich masses of brown
from the tops of the fertile trees down halfway to the ground, cone
touching cone in lavish clusters.
A single branch that might be
carried in the hand would be found to bear a hundred or more.
Some portions of the wood were almost impenetrable, but in general we
found no difficulty in mazing comfortably on over fallen logs and
under the spreading boughs, while here and there we came to an opening
sufficiently spacious for standpoints, where the trees around their
margins might be seen from top to bottom. The winter sunshine
streamed through the clustered spires, glinting and breaking into a
fine dust of spangles on the spiky leaves and beads of amber gum, and
bringing out the reds and grays and yellows of the lichened boles
which had been freshened by the late storm; while the tip of every
spire looking up through the shadows was dipped in deepest blue.
The ground was strewn with burs and needles and fallen trees; and,
down in the dells, on the north side of the dome, where strips of
aspen are imbedded in the spruces, every breeze sent the ripe leaves
flying, some lodging in the spruce boughs, making them bloom again,
while the fresh snow beneath looked like a fine painting.
Around the dome and well up toward the summit of the main peak, the
snow-shed was well marked with tracks of the mule deer and the pretty
stitching and embroidery of field mice, squirrels, and grouse; and on
the way back to camp I came across a strange track, somewhat like that
of a small bear, but more spreading at the toes. It proved to be that
of a wolverine. In my conversations with hunters, both Indians and
white men assure me that there are no bears in Nevada, notwithstanding
the abundance of pine-nuts, of which they are so fond, and the
accessibility of these basin ranges from their favorite haunts in the
Sierra Nevada and Wahsatch Mountains. The mule deer, antelope, wild
sheep, wolverine, and two species of wolves are all of the larger
animals that I have seen or heard of in the State.
XV
Glacial Phenomena in Nevada[20]
The monuments of the Ice Age in the Great Basin have been greatly
obscured and broken, many of the more ancient of them having perished
altogether, leaving scarce a mark, however faint, of their existence - a condition of things due not alone to the long-continued action of
post-glacial agents, but also in great part to the perishable
character of the rocks of which they were made. The bottoms of the
main valleys, once grooved and planished like the glacier pavements of
the Sierra, lie buried beneath sediments and detritus derived from the
adjacent mountains, and now form the arid sage plains; characteristic
U-shaped canyons have become V-shaped by the deepening of their
bottoms and straightening of their sides, and decaying glacier
headlands have been undermined and thrown down in loose taluses, while
most of the moraines and striae and scratches have been blurred or
weathered away. Nevertheless, enough remains of the more recent and
the more enduring phenomena to cast a good light well back upon the
conditions of the ancient ice sheet that covered this interesting
region, and upon the system of distinct glaciers that loaded the tops
of the mountains and filled the canyons long after the ice sheet had
been broken up.
The first glacial traces that I noticed in the basin are on the
Wassuck, Augusta, and Toyabe ranges, consisting of ridges and canyons,
whose trends, contours, and general sculpture are in great part
specifically glacial, though deeply blurred by subsequent denudation.
These discoveries were made during the summer of 1876-77. And again,
on the 17th of last August, while making the ascent of Mount
Jefferson, the dominating mountain of the Toquima range, I discovered
an exceedingly interesting group of moraines, canyons with V-shaped
cross sections, wide neve amphitheatres, moutoneed rocks, glacier
meadows, and one glacier lake, all as fresh and telling as if the
glaciers to which they belonged had scarcely vanished.
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. Its height is
approximately eleven thousand three hundred feet above the sea.
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