Colorado -- Description and travel; Natural history -- Outdoor books; Rocky Mountain National Park (Colo.) -- History; Rocky Mountains
This Park is a wilderness. Though entirely surrounded by settlers and
villages, it is an almost unbroken wild. Many of its peaks are as yet
unclimbed. There are pathless forests, unvisited gorges, unnamed
lakes, and unknown localities.
Gray and red granite form the larger portion of its surface. Here and
there are mixtures of schist, gneiss, and porphyry. The northwest
corner is volcanic and is made up of rhyolite, obsidian, and lava. The
Indians have a tradition concerning the volcanic activity of Specimen
Mountain, though I doubt if this mountain has been active within a
century. It is a dead or sleeping volcano. A part of its old
crater-rim has fallen away, and brilliant flowers cover the cold ashes
in the crater.
Most of the territory was glaciated during the last ice age, and there
still remain five small glaciers and a number of ice-fields. The
Hallett Glacier is on the north shoulder of Hague's Peak, the Sprague
Glacier on the south side of Stone's Peak, Tyndall Glacier between
Flat-Top and Mt. Hallett, and Andrews Glacier in a cirque of Loch
Vale, while an unnamed small one is at the bottom of the east
precipice of Long's Peak.
There can hardly be found a greater and more closely gathered area of
imposing, easily read glacial records than those which centre about
Long's Peak. These works of the Ice King, both intact and partly
ruined, have attracted the attention and study of a number of
prominent geologists and glaciologists. Among these ice works Dr.
Hayden and Dr. David Starr Jordan have climbed and wandered. Vernon L.
Kellogg has here gathered material for a book, and Dr. Edward L.
Orton, former State Geologist of Ohio, has spent many weeks here in
study. Within a six-mile radius of the top of Long's Peak are more
than thirty glacier lakes and perhaps twice as many lakelets or
mountain tarns. Immediately south of the Peak, Wild Basin is literally
filled with glacier-records. To the north is Moraine Park; to the
northwest, Glacier Gorge and Loch Vale; to the west, lying between
the Peak and Grand Lake, there is a wondrous area of the Ice King's
topography.
Bierstadt, St. Vrain, and Mills Moraines are imposing deposits of
glacial débris. Of these Mills Moraine has been the most studied. It
apparently holds the story of two widely separated ice ages. This
moraine evidently was formed by the glacier which made the basin of
Chasm Lake. It extends eastward from Long's Peak, its uppermost end
being at twelve thousand five hundred feet. At timber-line its trend
is toward the southeast. It is about one mile wide, five miles long,
and in places apparently more than one thousand feet deep.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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