Grand Lake, one of the largest reservoirs constructed by the Ice King in the Rocky Mountains, is three miles in length and one in width, cut into bed-rock. This lake is less than nine thousand feet above the sea. It is in the eastern extremity of Middle Park, a few miles to the west of Long's Peak. Great peaks rising from it, a great moraine sweeping along its northerly and westerly shores, it peacefully shows the titanic beautifying landscape labors of the ice. The glacial winter is over. The present snowfall over this section is about one half that of the Alps. Here snow-line is thirteen thousand feet above the sea, while in the Alps it is four thousand feet lower. Down from the heights of all the high peaks pour many white streams ever singing the song of the sea. In these mountains there are many deep gorges and cañons. Most of these are short and ice-polished. The Thompson Cañon is one of the longest and finest. Its twenty miles of walled length is full of scenic contrasts and picturesque varieties. The lovely mingles with the wild. In places its walls stand two thousand feet above the river and the daisies. The walls are many-formed, rugged, polished, perpendicular, terraced, and statuesque, and are adorned with panels of rusty veneer, with decorative lichen tracery or with vertical meadows of velvet moss. Blossoms fill many niches with poetry, while shrubbery, concealing in its clinging the cracks in the wall, forms many a charming festoon. In some stretches the parallel walls go straight away, well separated; then they curve, or crowd so closely that there is barely room for the river and the road. At intervals the walls sweep outward in short, grand semicircles and inclose ideal wild gardens of pines, grass, flowers, and the winding river. The river is ever varying its speed, its surface, and its song. Here it is a boulder-framed mirror reflecting the aspens and the sky, there a stretch of foam-flow; now it rests in a wild pool pierced with sharp rocks, now it hurries on to plunge and roar over a terrace of rocks, then on, always on, toward the sea. Speckled and rainbow trout dart in the streams. Mountain sheep climb and pose on the crags; bear, deer, and mountain lions are still occasionally seen prowling the woods or hurrying across the meadows. The wise coyote is also occasionally seen darting under cover, and he is frequently heard during the night. Here among the evergreens is found that wee and audacious bit of intensely interesting and animated life, the Frémont squirrel, and also, one of the dearest of all small animals, the merry chipmunk. Within this territory are a number of beaver colonies, whose ways I have described in earlier chapters.