The Spell of the Rockies

by Enos A. Mills

The Maker of Scenery and
Soil

During my first boyish exploring trip in the Rocky Mountains I was impressed with the stupendous changes which the upper slope of these mountains had undergone. In places were immense embankments and wild deltas of débris that plainly had come from elsewhere. In other places the rough edges of the cañons and ridges had been trimmed and polished; their cliffs and projections were gone and their surfaces had been swept clean of all loose material. Later, I tried vainly to account for some cañon walls being trimmed and polished at the bottom while their upper parts were jagged. In most cañons the height of the polishings above the bottom was equal on both walls, with the upper edge of the polish even or level for the entire length of the cañon. In one cañon, in both floor and walls, were deep lateral scratches in the rocks.

One day I found some polished boulders perched like driftwood on the top of a polished rock dome; they were porphyry, while the dome was flawless granite. They plainly had come from somewhere else. How they managed to be where they were was too much for me. Mountain floods were terrible but not wild enough in their fiercest rushes to do this. Upon a mountainside across a gorge about two miles distant, and a thousand feet above the perched boulders on the dome, I found a porphyry outcrop; but this situation only added to my confusion. I did not then know of the glacial period, or the actions of glaciers. It was a delightful revelation when John Muir told me of these wonders.

Much of the earth's surface, together with most mountain-ranges, have gone through a glacial period or periods. There is extensive and varied evidence that the greater portion of the earth has been carved and extensively changed by the Ice King. Substantial works, blurred and broken records, and impressive ruins in wide array over the earth show long and active possession by the Ice King, as eloquently as the monumental ruins in the Seven Hills tell of their intense association with man.

Both the northern and the southern hemispheres have had their heavy, slow-going floods of ice that appear to have swept from the polar world far toward the equator. During the great glacial period, which may have lasted for ages, a mountainous flood of ice overspread America from the north and extended far down the Mississippi Valley. This ice may have been a mile or more in depth. It utterly changed the topography and made a new earth. Lakes were filled and new ones made. New landscapes were formed: mountains were rubbed down to plains, morainal hills were built upon plains, and streams were moved bodily.

It is probable that during the last ice age the location and course of both the Ohio and the Missouri Rivers were changed. Originally the Missouri flowed east and north, probably emptying into a lake that had possession of the Lake Superior territory. The Ice King deliberately shoved this river hundreds of miles toward the south. The Ohio probably had a similar experience. These rivers appear to mark the "Farthest South" of the ice; their position probably was determined by the ice. Had a line been traced on the map along the ragged edge and front of the glacier at its maximum extension, this line would almost answer for the present position of the Missouri and Ohio Rivers.

THE HALLETT GLACIER

The most suggestive and revealing words concerning glaciers that I have ever read are these of John Muir in "The Mountains of California": "When we bear in mind that all the Sierra forests are young, growing upon moraine soil recently deposited, and that the flank of the range itself, with all its landscapes, is new-born, recently sculptured, and brought to light of day from beneath the ice mantle of the glacial winter, then a thousand lawless mysteries disappear and broad harmonies take their places."

"A glacier," says Judge Junius Henderson, in the best definition that I have heard, "is a body of ice originating in an area where the annual accumulation of snow exceeds the dissipation, and moving downward and outward to an area where dissipation exceeds accumulation."