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Updated: July 31, 2024
"Are those bluish draggled masses hanging down from beneath the snow-fields what you call the snouts of the glaciers?" "Yes." "What made the hollows they are in?" "The glaciers themselves, just as traveling animals make their own tracks." "How long have they been there?" "Numberless centuries," etc.
Sometimes it picks its precarious way over snow-fields which hang at dizzy heights, and again it flounders through mountain streams, where the tired horses must struggle for footing, and do not even dare to stoop and drink. It is dusty; it is wet. It climbs; it falls; it is beautiful and terrible. But always it skirts the coast of adventure.
The gates of the fort flung open, creaking with the frost rust, and Hearne came out, followed by his little company, the dog bells of the long toboggan sleighs setting up a merry jingling as the huskies broke from a trot to a gallop over the snow-fields for the North. Heading west-northwest, the band travelled swiftly with all the enthusiasm of untested courage.
Our Bacchic journey had reached its close; and it boots not here to tell in detail how we made our way across the Splügen, piercing its avalanches by low-arched galleries scooped from the solid snow, and careering in our sledges down perpendicular snow-fields, which no one who has crossed that pass from the Italian side in winter will forget.
They drift downward, at first, as noiselessly as thistledowns; then they strike the rocks and come crashing towards the lake with the hollow roar of an avalanche. At the head of the lake we find ourselves in an enormous amphitheatre of mountains. Glaciers are peering down upon us. Snow-fields glare at us with glistening eyes. Black crags seem to bend above us with an eternal frown.
Here the deep moss or tundra extended quite to the top of the smallest peak, but although heavy snow-fields lay at the top, the spring sunshine had now melted the snow at the lower levels, so that continually they were walking in little pools of ice-water, none too pleasant to persons shod as they were.
And upon the fourth day, in a blaze of sunlight, that set the uncharted snow-fields glittering like dust of diamonds, they crossed the Pass, Lenox's own Pass, that no living man had set eyes or foot upon, and looked at last on that elusive 'other side, that draws certain natures like a magnet to the far-flung limits of earth.
As we crossed the stone bridge over the river, a valley opened suddenly on the left, disclosing the whole range of the Taurus, which we now saw on its northern side, a vast stretch of rocky spires, with sparkling snow-fields between, and long ravines filled with snow, extending far down between the dark blue cliffs and the dark green plumage of the cedars.
Crossing to the east of the Grand Cañon, we find other lava-floods poured over the country at intervals, surmounted by San Francisco a volcanic mountain of the first magnitude which reaches an elevation, according to Wheeler, of 12,562 feet above the ocean. It has long been extinct, and its summit and flanks are covered with snow-fields and glaciers.
We left the boat, followed this stream by its downward leaps through uninvaded nature for more than a mile, and found that it flows from a smaller lake, not more than three miles in circuit, which lies directly at the base of two tremendous peaks of the Sierra, white with immense and perpetual snow-fields.
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