"Yes, I have," I said. "I have seen glaciers before, though none so
big as this one. Do not look for me until I make my appearance on the
river-bank. Never mind me. I am used to caring for myself." And so,
shouldering my bundle, I trudged off through the moraine boulders and
thickets.
My general plan was to trace the terminal moraine to its extreme
north end, pitch my little tent, leave the blanket and most of the
hardtack, and from this main camp go and come as hunger required or
allowed.
After examining a cross-section of the broad moraine, roughened by
concentric masses, marking interruptions in the recession of the
glacier of perhaps several centuries, in which the successive
moraines were formed and shoved together in closer or wider order, I
traced the moraine to its northeastern extremity and ascended the
glacier for several miles along the left margin, then crossed it at
the grand cataract and down the right side to the river, and along
the moraine to the point of beginning.
On the older portions of this moraine I discovered several kettles in
process of formation and was pleased to find that they conformed in
the most striking way with the theory I had already been led to make
from observations on the old kettles which form so curious a feature
of the drift covering Wisconsin and Minnesota and some of the larger
moraines of the residual glaciers in the California Sierra. I found
a pit eight or ten feet deep with raw shifting sides countersunk
abruptly in the rough moraine material, and at the bottom, on sliding
down by the aid of a lithe spruce tree that was being undermined, I
discovered, after digging down a foot or two, that the bottom was
resting on a block of solid blue ice which had been buried in the
moraine perhaps a century or more, judging by the age of the tree
that had grown above it. Probably more than another century will be
required to complete the formation of this kettle by the slow melting
of the buried ice-block. The moraine material of course was falling
in as the ice melted, and the sides maintained an angle as steep as
the material would lie. All sorts of theories have been advanced for
the formation of these kettles, so abundant in the drift over a great
part of the United States, and I was glad to be able to set the
question at rest, at least as far as I was concerned.
The glacier and the mountains about it are on so grand a scale and so
generally inaccessible in the ordinary sense, it seemed to matter but
little what course I pursued. Everything was full of interest, even
the weather, though about as unfavorable as possible for wide views,
and scrambling through the moraine jungle brush kept one as wet as if
all the way was beneath a cascade.
