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Most of the glaciers melted long ago, but on Mount Lyell, on Shasta, and a few of the Sierra summits may still be found those ever-living ice-rivers, the one on Mount Lyell being the source of the Tuolumne River.
Immediately beneath you are the Big Tuolumne Meadows, smooth lawns with large breadths of woods on either side, and watered by the young Tuolumne River, rushing cool and clear from its many snow- and ice-fountains. Nearly all the upper part of the basin of the Tuolumne Glacier is in sight, one of the greatest and most influential of all the Sierra ice-rivers.
This gigantic glacier, or stream of ice, springing, as it does, from the giant-mountain of Europe, is appropriately hemmed in, and its mighty force restrained, by a group of Titans, whose sharp aiguilles, or needle-like peaks, shoot upward to a height little short of their rounded and white-headed superior, and from whose wild gorges and riven sides tributary ice-rivers flow, and avalanches thunder incessantly.
Even to those who observe her carelessly, she is not altogether dumb. She is generous; and the God of Nature has caused it to be written for our instruction that, "His works are wonderful, sought out of all them that have pleasure therein." We may not, however, prolong our remarks on the subject of ice-rivers at this time.
Finally, pursuing my investigations across the basins of the Kaweah and Tule, I discovered that the sequoia belt attained its greatest development just where, owing to the topographical peculiarities of the region, the ground had been best protected from the main ice-rivers that continued to pour past from the summit fountains long after the smaller local glaciers had been melted.
This was well-nigh encompassed by a wall of sheer cliffs; toward the East and the great mountains they drew together till they went near to meet, and left but a narrow path on either side of a stony stream that came rattling down into the Dale: toward the river at that end the hills lowered somewhat, though they still ended in sheer rocks; but up from it, and more especially on the north side, they swelled into great shoulders of land, then dipped a little, and rose again into the sides of huge fells clad with pine-woods, and cleft here and there by deep ghylls: thence again they rose higher and steeper, and ever higher till they drew dark and naked out of the woods to meet the snow-fields and ice-rivers of the high mountains.
However, even if an increase in the volume of the Mississippi, for a period of ten or twenty years, were certain, it would still be premature to consider this increase as normal and constant, since it might very well be produced by causes yet unknown and analogous to those which influence the mysterious advance and retreat of those Alpine ice-rivers, the glaciers.
Finally, pursuing my investigations across the basins of the Kaweah and Tule, I discovered that the Sequoia belt attained its greatest development just where, owing to the topographical peculiarities of the region, the ground had been most perfectly protected from the main ice-rivers that continued to pour past from the summit fountains long after the smaller local glaciers had been melted.
We made for the Northern coast, and ran for some hundred miles, along a sea-bord not unlike that of Norway, but on a miniature scale. Though in some former age this hemisphere, like Europe, has been subject to glacial action much more general and intense than at present, its ice-seas and ice-rivers must always have been comparatively shallow and feeble.
Then the eager young men and the hunters, and those who knew the mountain best drew together about the hearth, and fell to talking of the hunting of the elk; and there were three there who knew both the woods and also the fells right up to the ice-rivers better than any other; and these said that they who were fain of the hunting of the elk would have no likelier time than that day for a year to come.
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