Himalayan Journals — Volume 1: Or, Notes of a Naturalist in Bengal, the Sikkim and Nepal Himalayas, the Khasia Mountains, etc.Hooker, Joseph Dalton
History
Himalayan Journals — Volume 1: 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.
Ascending the great moraine at a place where it overhung the main
river, I had a good _coup-a'oeil_ 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.
Illustration--ANCIENT MORAINES IN THE RAMBACHEN VALLEY.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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