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Updated: June 20, 2025
If you think it an easy thing to walk over a pile of moraine by the obscure light preceding dawn try it! The great moraines flank the mountains in petrified billows stranded on the shores of time from the ice ages, in stones from the size of a spool to a house. Step on the small stones; and they roll, bringing down the whole bank in a miniature slide under your feet!
Thence, crossing the range by the lowest passes, it descends to the eastern base, and pushes out for a considerable distance into the hot volcanic plains, growing bravely upon well-watered moraines, gravelly lake basins, arctic ridges, and torrid lava-beds; planting itself upon the lips of craters, flourishing vigorously even there, and tossing ripe cones among the ashes and cinders of Nature's hearths.
The big stones alone in the fields must come from vanished glaciers, and they searched for moraines and faluns. They were several times taken for pedlars on account of their equipage; and when they had answered that they were "engineers," a dread seized them the usurpation of such a title might entail unpleasant consequences.
The distinct character of the drift in the two cases is such as it would be if two colossal glaciers should now come down from the higher Alps through the valleys traversed by those rivers, leaving their moraines in the low country.
The summits and connecting ridges are mere blades and points, ground sharp by the glaciers that descended on both sides to the main valleys. From one standpoint I counted nine of these glacial channels with their moraines sweeping grandly out to the plains to deep sheer-walled neve-fountains at their heads, making a most vivid picture of the last days of the Ice Period.
Both ice sheets and valley glaciers drag on large quantities of rock waste in their ground moraines. Stones transported by glaciers are sometimes called erratics. Such are the bowlders of the drift of our northern states. Erratics may be set down in an insecure position on the melting of the ice. DEPOSIT. Little need be added here to what has already been said of ground and terminal moraines.
Moraines are not wanting to complete the chain of evidence respecting the ancient existence of glaciers in this country, although we cannot expect to find them here so frequently as in Europe, where the many local glaciers in circumscribed valleys afforded special facilities for the building up of these lateral and transverse walls.
The valley glaciers which unite and spread to form this lake of ice lie above the snow line and their moraines are concealed beneath neve.
In short, Agassiz found, as he had anticipated, that in the mountains of Scotland, Wales, and the north of England, the valleys were in many instances traversed by terminal moraines and bordered by lateral ones, as in Switzerland. Nor were any of the accompanying phenomena wanting.
Lying side by side, or one above another, without being subject to pressure from the ice, they retain, both in the lateral and medial moraines, and even in the terminal moraines, their original size, their rough surfaces, and their angular form.
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