A CREVASSE
For the study of old glacier records few places can equal the Estes Park district in Colorado. The Arapahoe, on Arapahoe Peak, Colorado, is an excellent glacier to visit. It is characteristic and is easy of access. It is close to civilization,—within a few miles of a railroad,—is comprehensively situated, and is amid some of the grandest scenery in the Rocky Mountains. It has been mapped and studied, and its rate of movement and many other things concerning it are accurately known. It is the abstract and brief chronicle of the Ice Age, a key to all the glacier ways and secrets.
In the Arapahoe Glacier one may see the cirque in which the snow is deposited or drifted by the wind; and the bergschlund-yawn—crack of separation—made by glacier ice where it moves away from the névé or snowy ice above. In walking over the ice in summer one may see or descend into the crevasses. These deep, wide cracks, miniature cañons, are caused by the ice flowing over inequalities in the surface. At the end of this glacier one may see the terminal moraine,—a raw, muddy pile of powdered, crushed, and rounded rocks. Farther along down the slope one may see the lakes that were made, the rocks that were polished, and the lateral moraine deposited by the glacier in its bigger days,—times when the Ice King almost conquered the earth.
In the Rocky Mountains the soil and morainal débris were transported only a few miles, while the Wisconsin and Iowa glaciers brought thousands of acres of rich surfacing, now on the productive farms of Ohio, Illinois, and Iowa, from places hundreds of miles to the north in Canada. In the Rocky Mountains most of the forests are growing in soil or moraines that were ground and distributed by glaciers. Thus the work of the glaciers has made the earth and the mountains far more useful in addition to giving them gentler influences,—charming lakes and flowing landscape lines. It is wonderful that the mighty worker and earth-shaper, the Ice King, should have used snowflakes for edge-tools, millstones, and crushing stamps!
To know the story of the Ice King—to be able to understand and restore the conditions that made lakes and headlands, moraines and fertile fields—will add mightily to the enjoyment of a visit to the Rocky Mountains, the Alps, the coasts and mountains of Norway and New England, Alaska's unrivaled glacier realm, or the extraordinary ice sculpturing in the Yosemite National Park.
Edward Orton, Jr., formerly State Geologist of Ohio, who spent weeks toiling over and mapping the Mills Moraine on the east slope of Long's Peak, gave a glimpse of what one may feel and enjoy from nature investigation in his closing remarks concerning this experience. He said, "If one adds to the physical pleasures of mountaineering, the intellectual delight of looking with the seeing eye, of explaining, interpreting, and understanding the gigantic forces which have wrought these wonders; if by these studies one's vision may be extended past the sublime beauties of the present down through the dim ages of the past until each carved and bastioned peak tells a romance above words; if by communion with this greatness, one's soul is uplifted and attuned into fuller accord with the great cosmic forces of which we are the higher manifestation, then mountaineering becomes not a pastime but an inspiration."