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Updated: June 22, 2025
Beyond the serracs was the main stream of comparatively smooth ice, with its mourning band of moraine, and beyond that the mammoth sweep and curve of the Théodule where these glaciers join. Peak after peak of dazzling snow dwindled away to the left. Only the gaunt Riffelhorn reared a brown head against the blue. And there we sat, Mrs.
I had never seen a glacier or moraine on land before, but being familiar with sea ice and berg transport, from voyaging in the South Polar regions, I was strongly inclined to attribute the formation of this moraine to a period when a glacial ocean stood high on the Himalaya, made fiords of the valleys, and floated bergs laden with blocks from the lateral gulleys, which the winds and currents would deposit along certain lines.
They walked through pinewoods, through forests of maple, silver fir, and larch, and miles of huge bushes of flowering rhododendrons. They toiled up a rough and stony track over bare and desolate land that was an old moraine and under moraine terraces one above another, forming giant spurs of the rugged hills.
The glaciers in this vicinity, therefore, must have run out into the water six or seven miles, and doubtless formed icebergs at their point, and, therefore, formed there no terminal moraine.
As the buried ice melted, of course the moraine material above and about it fell in, forming hopper-shaped hollows, while the grass growing on their sides and around them prevented the rain and wind from filling them up.
They have been advanced at least a mile over the old re-formed moraines, as is shown by the overlying, angular, recent moraine deposits, now being laid down, which are continuous with the medial moraines of the glacier. In the old stratified moraine banks, trunks and branches of trees showing but little sign of decay occur at a height of about a hundred feet above tide-water.
The stage road from Truckee to the summit runs along the base of a moraine close by the margin of the lake on one side, while on the other side, along the apparently almost perpendicular rocky face of the amphitheater, 1000 feet above the surface of the lake, the Central Pacific Railroad winds its fearful way to the same place.
A limestone of the age of our Portland stone on which this old moraine rests, has its surface polished like a looking-glass, displaying beautiful sections of fossil shells of the genera Nerinaea and Pteroceras, while occasionally, besides finer striae, there are deep rectilinear grooves, agreeing in direction with the course in which the extinct glacier would have moved according to the theory of M. Guyot, before explained.
A portion of the way is dangerous, the moraine bluff being capped by an overlying lobe of the glacier, which as it melts sends down boulders and fragments of ice, while the strip of sandy shore at high tide is only a few rods wide, leaving but little room to escape from the falling moraine material and the berg-waves.
Where the glacier ends in a plain or wide valley, the rocks are accumulated in a terminal moraine, but in numerous instances the water which pours from the ice-river has forces enough to carry down to larger streams the masses delivered by the glacier, and there they, with other stones washed out from the earth by the current, are ground down, so that few of the affluents of the Swiss lakes deliver into them anything but fine sand and slime.
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