Letters to a Friend, Written to Mrs. Ezra S. Carr, 1866-1879Muir, John
History
Letters to a Friend, Written to Mrs. Ezra S. Carr, 1866-1879
Muir, John
Natural history -- California; Naturalists -- United States -- Correspondence; Yosemite National Park (Calif.) -- Description and travel
On observing my stakes on the 6th of Oct., or in 46 days after being
planted, I found that stake No. 1 had been carried down stream 11 inches;
No. 2, 18 inches; No. 3, 34; No. 4, 47 inches. As stake No. 4 was near
the middle of the glacier, perhaps it was not far from the point of
maximum velocity, 47 inches in 46 days, or 1 inch per day. Stake No. 5
was planted about midway between the head of the glacier and stake No.
[ ]. Its motion I found to be in 46 days 40 inches.
Thus these ice-masses are seen to possess the true glacial motion. Their
surfaces are striped with bent dirt bands. Their surfaces are bulged
and undulated by inequalities in the bottom of their basins, causing an
upward and downward swedging corresponding to the horizontal swedging
as indicated by the curved dirt bands.
The McClure Glacier is about half a mile in length and about the same in
width at the broadest place. It is crevassed on the southeast corner.
The crevass runs about southwest and northeast and is several hundred
yards in length. Its width is nowhere more than one foot.
The Mt. Lyell Glacier, separated from that of McClure by a narrow crest,
is about a mile in width by a mile in length.
I have planted stakes in the glacier of Red Mountains also but have not
yet observed them.
[No date.]
[Beginning of letter missing.]
In going up any of the principal Yosemite streams, lakes in all stages
of decay are found in great abundance, regularly becoming younger until
we reach the almost countless gems of the summits with scarce an inch
of carex upon their shallow, sandy borders and with their bottoms still
bright with the polish of ice. Upon the Nevada and its branches there
are not fewer than a hundred of these glacial lakes from a mile to a
hundred yards in diameter with countless glistening pondlets not much
larger than moons.
All of the grand fir forests about the valley are planted upon moraines,
and from any of the mountain-tops the shape and extent of the neighboring
moraines may always be surely determined by the firs growing upon them.
Some pines will grow upon shallow sand and crumbling granite, but those
luxuriant forests of the silver firs are always upon a generous bed of
glacial drift. I discovered a moraine with smooth pebbles upon a shoulder
of the South Dome, and upon every part of the Yosemite upper and lower
walls.
I am surprised to find that _water_ has had so little to do with mountain
structure here. Whitney says that there is no proof that glaciers ever
flowed in this valley, yet its walls have not been eroded to the depth of
an inch since the ice left it, and glacial action is glaringly apparent
many miles below the valley.
The bottom portion of the foregoing section, with perpendicular sides,
is here about two feet in depth and was cut by the water. The Nevada
here _never was_ more than four or five feet deep, and all of the bank
records of all the upper streams say the same thing of the absence of
great floods.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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