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On the top of Mount Washington, in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, in a cleft known as Tuckerman's Ravine, where the deposit accumulates to a great depth, the snow-ice remains until midsummer. It is, indeed, evident that a very slight change in the climatal conditions of this locality would establish a permanent accumulation of frozen water upon the summit of the mountain.
It had preserved its outlines unusually well, and stood upright to the last moment; though, owing to numerous strata of snow-ice, its base had melted much more on one of its sides than on the other.
Gathering velocity, and with the materials heaped together from the junction of that already in motion with that about to be moved, the avalanche in sliding a few hundred feet down the slope may become a deep stream of snow-ice, moving with great celerity. At this stage it begins to break off masses of ice from the glaciers over which it may flow, or even to move large stones.
The rocks and bleached drift-logs, extending some way into the shaggy woods, showed a rise and fall of six or eight feet, caused partly by the dam at the outlet. They said that in winter the snow was three feet deep on a level here, and sometimes four or five, that the ice on the lake was two feet thick, clear, and four feet, including the snow-ice. Ice had already formed in vessels.
But the snow-ice on Milton Pond was "hubbly" and not nice to skate on, while there were only a few patches of smooth ice anywhere in town. Therefore the boys never failed to flood the interior of the snow castle each night before they went home. They did this easily by means of a short piece of fire-hose attached to the nearby hydrant.
So far the method worked well. But then comes the third item "It is all a mass of steam." What in the world does that mean? The man has gone out if not out on to the Barrier, then certainly into it into snow-ice, and then he comes back and says that it is all a mass of steam. It seems ridiculous absurd.
When a warm rain in the middle of the winter melts off the snow-ice from Walden, and leaves a hard dark or transparent ice on the middle, there will be a strip of rotten though thicker white ice, a rod or more wide, about the shores, created by this reflected heat. Also, as I have said, the bubbles themselves within the ice operate as burning-glasses to melt the ice beneath.
In going over this projection the mass of snow-ice breaks to pieces, forming a crowd of blocks which march down the slope with much more speed than they journeyed when united in the higher-lying fields. In this condition and in this part of the movement the snow-ice forms what are called the seracs, or curds, as the word means in the French-Swiss dialect.
About midday, Captain Lund drove down on the ice to draw up the boat owned by his sons; after which he was to return a second time for the decoys and shooting-box of the homeward-bound sportsmen. The floe was fast wasting under the April sun, and his horses' iron-shod hoofs sank deep into the snow-ice, which the night-frosts had left at morn as hard as flint.
These were elevated on blocks of snow-ice, which strikingly imitated, at a little distance, the hue of the under feathers, and a fire-blackened stake set in the ice, at one end, with a collar of white birch bark at its junction, completed the rude but effective imitation.
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