Glacières; or, Freezing Caverns

by Edwin Swift Balch

The Gulch lies between Crescent and Black Mountains. The altitude of the upper end of the Gulch is something over eight hundred meters, that of the lower end about six hundred meters. It is some fifteen hundred meters long, and averages perhaps one hundred meters in width at the top, and only a few meters at the bottom. The depth may be about seventy-five meters and the sides are steep, in some places sheer. The bottom is a mass of broken, fallen rocks, with a good many trees growing among them. There are several steps, so to speak, in the Gulch, which are called chambers, although the term seems rather meaningless. Promenading through the bottom of the Gulch was fraught with difficulty, because the rocks were placed in most unsuitable positions for human progression, and my hands were certainly as useful to me as my feet in preserving equilibrium. We found ice in one or two places, but not in any great quantity. In one spot it was overlaid by water. My guide said that there was less ice than the year before. A large piece which we broke off, and which furnished us with a cooling morsel of frozen fluid, was full of air bubbles. It was not prismatic ice, and was certainly unusual in formation. It crunched up under the teeth and, although it did not look like solidified snow, yet, judging from its position among the boulders, it was doubtless formed from the melting and refreezing of snow.[9] My guide said he had heard that fresh ice began to form sometimes in September. The Gulch is well protected against wind, and I detected no draughts among the rocks. Except in the immediate vicinity of the ice, the temperature was not abnormally low.

[9] On the 17th of February, 1899, four days after the greatest snow storm in Philadelphia in many years, I noticed that the snow on my roof solidified slowly into a mass of ice which contained a good many air-bubbles. It strikingly resembled the ice of the Ice Gulch, only that it was more solid and did not have more than half as many air-bubbles.

On returning to the Mount Crescent House, I had a talk with Mr. Charles E. Lowe, Sr., who told me that Alpine plants, like those which grow on Mount Washington and Mount Adams, are found in the Gulch; but that they do not exist on the neighboring Black and Crescent Mountains. He said also that ice was present in more than one place in King’s Ravine, and that it was always there.

FREEZING BOULDER TALUS AT RUMNEY.

About three kilometers south of Rumney, New Hampshire, there is a hill called Bald Mountain, which, about three hundred meters west of the carriage road from Rumney to Plymouth, descends as a big cliff, with an exposure facing nearly southeast. At the base of this cliff, there is a talus[10] which I visited on the 27th of August, 1898, with the Sheriff of Rumney, Mr. Learned. He said he had found plenty of ice there on the 18th of August, 1897, but he doubted whether there would be any left this year, on account of the hot weather. Effectively a careful hunt failed to reveal any ice, although the talus was just the kind of place where it might have been expected, as the boulders were piled one over the other and in one or two places there were considerable hollows. The temperatures were normal, and there were no draughts. The talus is exposed to the sun, and only moderately sheltered against wind by a scrub forest. But there can be no doubt, that ice lingers there long after it has disappeared from every other spot in the neighborhood, and it seems as if our not finding any, is another proof that it is the heat of summer which melts it away.

[10] Mr. John Ritchie, Jr., wrote me about this place, where he had found ice plentiful some years ago in August, within two or three meters from the outside: he considered it only a refrigerator.

ICE FORMATIONS AND WINDHOLES AT WATERTOWN.

At Watertown, New York, on the south side of the Black River, in the town itself, are some natural cracks or crevices in the limestone rocks. They are only a short distance from the New York Central Railroad station. The cracks enter the northern side of the railroad embankment, pass under the railroad tracks, and extend some distance back. In front of them are four cellars, used for storing beer kegs. The lessor, Mr. Ehrlicher, obligingly had the cellars opened for me, on the 12th of September, 1898. There was neither ice nor draughts in the cellars, and the temperature was normal. Mr. Ehrlicher said that in the spring there was ice in the cracks, but that it had all melted away as the result of the hot summer.