e is speedily left behind, and
patches of bryanthus, cassiope and arctic willows begin to appear. The
small lakes which a few miles down the Valley are so richly bordered
with flowery meadows have at an elevation of 10,000 feet only small
brown mats of carex, leaving bare rocks around more than half their
shores. Yet, strange to say, amid all this arctic repression the
mountain pine on ledges and buttresses of Red Mountain seems to find the
climate best suited to it. Some specimens that I measured were over a
hundred feet high and twenty-four feet in circumference, showing hardly
a trace of severe storms, looking as fresh and vigorous as the giants of
the lower zones. Evening came on just as I got fairly into the main
canyon. It is about a mile wide and a little less than two miles long.
The crumbling spurs of Red Mountain bound it on the north, the somber
cliffs of Merced Mountain on the south and a deeply-serrated, splintered
ridge curving around from mountain to mountain shuts it in on the east.
My camp was on the brink of one of the lakes in a thicket of mountain
hemlock, partly sheltered from the wind. Early next morning I set out to
trace the ancient glacier to its head. Passing around the north shore of
my camp lake I followed the main stream from one lakelet to another. The
dwarf pines and hemlocks disappeared and the stream was bordered with
icicles. The main lateral moraines that extend from the mouth of the
canyon are continued in straggling masses along the walls. Tracing the
streams back to the highest of its little lakes, I noticed a deposit of
fine gray mud, something like the mud corn from a grindstone. This
suggested its glacial origin, for the stream that was carrying it issued
from a raw-looking moraine that seemed to be in process of formation.
It is from sixty to over a hundred feet high in front, with a slope of
about thirty-eight degrees. Climbing to the top of it, I discovered a
very small but well-characterized glacier swooping down from the shadowy
cliffs of the mountain to its terminal moraine. The ice appeared on all
the lower portion of the glacier; farther up it was covered with snow.
The uppermost crevasse or "bergeschrund" was from twelve to fourteen
feet wide. The melting snow and ice formed a network of rills that ran
gracefully down the surface of the glacier, merrily singing in their
shining channels. After this discovery I made excursions over all the
High Sierra and discovered that wh