the mountains
were golden only in the sunset, and the Indians and bison alive only in
the immortal epics of the frontier, somehow did not disappoint me. So
wonderful were those rocky upheavals in the reality, so intriguing were
the traces of redskin and buffalo, I forgot my fantastic
misconceptions. To my enthusiastic youth, everything was
extraordinary, alluring, primitively satisfying. Parson Lamb said the
big game were gone, but there were enough left to give me many a thrill.

Naturally, at first, I saw only the more obvious wonders of the wilds,
but as time passed I discovered other sources of interest, hitherto
unheard of. High and dry upon the meadows and lower mountain sides
were smooth, round bowlders, undoubtedly water-worn. The granite walls
of many of the canyons I climbed were curiously scored--here and there
were inlaid bands of varying colored stone. Running out from the
loftier ranges were long, comparatively narrow heaps of earth, which
resembled giant railroad fills as flat on top as though they had been
sliced off by a titanic butcher knife. They were covered with forests,
and small, jewel-like lakes were set in their level summits. At the
foot of Long's and many other peaks were more lakes, with slick,
glazed, granite sides. The water in them was usually greenish and
always icy. There were immense, dirty "snowdrifts" that never
diminished, but appeared to be perpetual.

Following my trapline or trailing the Big-horn or watching the beaver,
I noticed these things and wondered about them. How came those
bowlders, round and polished, so far from water? What made those
scratches upon those granite cliffs? What Herculean master-smith fused
those decorative belts into their very substance? What engineer built
those table-topped mounds? Who had gouged out the bowls for those icy
lakes? Why were some snowdrifts perennial? I puzzled over these
conundrums, until, bit by bit, I solved them. The answers were more
amazing than anything else I encountered in the wilds.

I learned that those sand-coated drifts were not drifts at all, but
glaciers, probably the oldest living things in the world. For they
were alive, moving deposits of ice and snow, the survivors of the ice
age. Eons ago, they and their like had gouged out the huge bowls which
later became lakes, had gashed the earth and scoured its canyon walls,
leaving in their wakes those square-topped dumps or moraines; debris,
once solid