Colorado -- Description and travel; Natural history -- Outdoor books; Rocky Mountain National Park (Colo.) -- History; Rocky Mountains
Glaciers the world over have been the chief makers of lake-basins,
large and small. These basins were formed in darkness, and hundreds
and even thousands of years may have been required for the ice to
carve and set the gems whose presence now adds so much to the light
and beauty of the rugged mountain-ranges. The ponderous glaciers or
ice rivers in descending from the mountain-summits came down steep
slopes or precipitous walls and bore irresistibly against the bottom.
The vast weight of these embankments of ice moving almost end-on,
mixed with boulders, tore and wore excavations into the solid rock at
the bottom of each high, steep descent.
Nature's ways are interestingly complicated. Both the number and the
location of many of these glacier lakes are due in part to the
prevailing direction of the wind during the last glacial epoch. This
is especially true of those in the Snowy Range of the Rocky Mountains,
which fronts the Great Plains. The majority of the lakes in this range
are situated on its eastern slope. Westerly winds undoubtedly
prevailed on these mountains during the depositing of the snows which
formed and maintained the glaciers that excavated these lake-basins.
As a result, much of the snow which fell on the summit and its
westerly slope was swept across and deposited on the eastern slope,
thus producing on the eastern side deeper ice, more glaciers, and more
appreciable erosion from the glaciers. The eastern summit of this
range is precipitous and is deeply cut by numerous ice-worn cirques
which extend at right angles to the trend of this range. These cirques
frequently lie close together, separated by a thin precipitous wall,
or ridge. On the westerly side of the range the upper slopes descend
into the lowlands through slopes and ridges rounded and but little
broken. Over these it is possible to ride a horse to the summit, while
foot travel and careful climbing over precipitous rocky walls is in
most places required to gain the summit from the east.
Westerly winds still blow strongly, sometimes for weeks, and the
present scanty snowfall is largely swept from the western slopes and
deposited on the eastern side. So far as I know, all the remaining
glaciers in the front ranges are on the eastern slope. The Arapahoe,
Sprague, Hallett, and Andrews Glaciers and the one on Long's Peak are
on the eastern slope. They are but the stubs or remnants of large
glaciers, and their presence is due in part to the deep, cool cirques
cut out by the former ice-flows, and in part to the snows swept to
them by prevailing westerly winds.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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