Himalayan Journals — Complete: Or, Notes of a Naturalist in Bengal, the Sikkim and Nepal Himalayas, the Khasia Mountains, etc.Hooker, Joseph Dalton
History
Himalayan Journals — Complete: Or, Notes of a Naturalist in Bengal, the Sikkim and Nepal Himalayas, the Khasia Mountains, etc.
Hooker, Joseph Dalton
Himalaya Mountains -- Description and travel; Natural history -- Himalaya Mountains
The villagers received us very kindly, and furnished us with a guide
for the Choonjerma pass, leading to the Yalloong valley, the most
easterly in Nepal; but he recommended our not attempting any part of
the ascent till the morrow, as it was past 1 p.m., and we should find
no camping-ground for half the way up. The villagers gave us the leg of
a musk deer, and some red potatos, about as big as walnuts—all they
could spare from their winter-stock. With this scanty addition to our
stores we started down the valley, for a few miles alternately along
flat lake-beds and over moraines, till we crossed the stream from the
lateral valley, and ascending a little, camped on its bank, at 11,400
feet elevation.
In the afternoon I botanized amongst the moraines, which were very
numerous, and had been thrown down at right-angles to the main valley,
which latter being here very narrow, and bounded by lofty precipices,
must have stopped the parent glaciers, and effected the heaping of some
of these moraines to at least 1000 feet above the river. The general
features were modifications of those seen in the Yangma valley, but
contracted into a much smaller space.
The moraines were all accumulated in a sort of delta, through which the
lateral river debouched into the Kambachen, and were all deposited more
or less parallel to the course of the lateral valley, but curving
outwards from its mouth. The village-flat, or terrace, continued level
to the first moraine, which had been thrown down on the upper or north
side of the lateral valley, on whose and curving steep flanks it
abutted, and curving outwards seemed to encircle the village-flat on
the south and west; where it dipped into the river. This was crossed at
the height of about 100 feet, by a stony path, leading to the bed of
the rapid torrent flowing through shingle and boulders, beyond which
was another moraine, 250 feet high, and parallel to it a third gigantic
one.
[Illustration: Ancient moraines in the Kambachen Valley]
Ascending the great moraine at a place where it overhung the main
river, I had a good _coup-a’œil_ of the whole. The view south-east up
the glacial valley—(represented in the accompanying cut)—to the snowy
peaks south of Junnoo, was particularly grand, and most interesting
from the precision with which one great distant existing glacier was
marked by two waving parallel lines of lateral moraines, which formed,
as it were, a vast raised gutter, or channel, ascending from perhaps
16,000 feet elevation, till it was hidden behind a spur in the valley.
With a telescope I could descry many similar smaller glaciers, with
huge accumulations of shingle at their terminations; but this great one
was beautifully seen by the naked eye, and formed a very curious
feature in the landscape.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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