The Spell of the Rockies

by Enos A. Mills

Strange freight, of unknown age, these creeping ice rivers bring down. One season the frozen carcass of a mountain sheep was taken from the ice at the end of the Arapahoe Glacier. If this sheep fell into a crevasse at the upper end of the glacier, its carcass probably had been in the ice for more than a century. Human victims, too, have been strangely handled by glaciers. It appears that in 1820 Dr. Hamil and a party of climbers were struck by a snowslide on the slope of Mont Blanc. One escaped with his life, while the others were swept down into a crevasse and buried so deeply in the snow and ice that their bodies could not be recovered. Scientists said that at the rate the glacier was moving it would give up its dead after forty years. Far down the mountain forty-one years afterward, the ice gave up its victims. A writer has founded on this incident an interesting story, in which the bodies are recovered in an excellent state of preservation, and an old woman with sunken cheeks and gray hair clasps the youthful body of her lover of long ago, the guide.

Where morainal débris covers thousands of acres, it is probable that valuable mineral veins were in some cases covered, prospecting prevented, and mineral wealth lost; but on the other hand, the erosion done by the glacier, often cutting down several hundred feet, has in many cases uncovered leads which otherwise probably would have been left buried beyond search. Then, too, millions of dollars of placer gold have been washed from moraines.

In addition to the work of making and giving the mountains flowing lines of beauty, the glaciers added inconceivably to the richness of the earth's resources by creating vast estates of soil. It is probable that glaciers have supplied one half of the productive areas of the earth with soil; the mills of the glaciers have ground as much rock-flour—soil—for the earth as wind, frost, heat, and rain,—all the weathering forces. This flour and other coarser glacial grindings were quickly changed by the chemistry of Nature into plant-food,—the staff of life for forests and flowers.

Glaciers have not only ground the soil but in many places have carried this and spread it out hundreds of miles from the place where the original raw rocks were obtained. Wind and water have done an enormous amount of work sorting out the soil in moraines and, leaving the boulders behind, this soil was scattered and sifted far and wide to feed the hungry plant-life.

At last the Glacial Winter ended, and each year more snow melted and evaporated than fell. Snow-line retreated up the slopes and finally became broken, even in the heights. To-day, in the Rockies, there are only a dozen or so small glaciers, mere fragments of the once great ice cap which originally covered deeply all the higher places and slopes, and extended unbroken for hundreds of miles, pierced strangely with a few sharp peaks.

The small remaining glaciers in the Rocky Mountains lie in sheltered basins or cirques in the summits and mostly above the altitude of thirteen thousand feet. These are built and supplied by the winds which carry and sweep snow to them from off thousands of acres of treeless, barren summits. The present climate of these mountains is very different from what it was ages ago. Then for a time the annual snowfall was extremely heavy. Each year the sun and the wind removed only a part of the snow which fell during the year. This icy remainder was added to the left-over of preceding years until the accumulation was of vast depth and weight.

On the summit slopes this snow appears to have been from a few hundred to a few thousand feet deep. Softened from the saturation of melting and compressed from its own weight, it became a stratum of ice. This overlay the summit of the main ranges, and was pierced by only a few of the higher, sharper peaks which were sufficiently steep to be stripped of snow by snowslides and the wind.

The weight of this superimposed icy stratum was immense; it was greater than the bottom layers could support. Ice is plastic—rubbery—if sufficient pressure or weight be applied. Under the enormous pressure the bottom layers started to crawl or flow from beneath like squeezed dough. This forced mass moved outward and downward in the direction of the least resistance,—down the slope. Thus a glacier is conceived and born.

Numbers of these glaciers—immense serpents and tongues of ice—extended down the slopes, in places miles beyond the line of perpetual snow. Some of these were miles in length, a thousand or more feet wide, and hundreds of feet deep, and they forced and crushed their way irresistibly. It is probable they had a sustained, continuous flow for centuries.

A glacier is one of the natural wonders of the world and well might every one pay a visit to one of these great earth-sculpturers. The time to visit a glacier is during late summer, when the snows of the preceding winter are most completely removed from the surface. With the snows removed, the beauty of the ice and its almost stratified make-up are revealed. The snow, too, conceals the yawning bergschlunds and the dangerous, splendid crevasses. A visit to one of these ponderous, patient, and effective monsters is not without danger; concealed crevasses, or thinly covered icy caverns, or recently deposited and insecurely placed boulders on the moraines are potent dangers that require vigilance to avoid. However, the careful explorer will find one of these places far safer than the city's chaotic and crowded street.