There they began to see, at the lower border of the ice, vast quantities of drift spread far and wide, and to the right high naked ridges lying parallel to the course of the ice river. The crests of these ridges were sometimes fifty or sixty feet above the surface of the ice which lay against them and from a quarter to a half mile in length. At its lower border, the glacier had melted and had been covered with stones, so that it was hard to say just where the ice ended and the drift which it had carried before it began.
The main body of the glacier lay in the cup-shaped depression already spoken of, but high up on the rock wall behind it and to the left, was another enormous mass of ice looking like a huge snowball thrown against the wall. Its size was very great, but there was no means of estimating it. Hugh thought that the lower ice was two miles across, and nearly a mile deep.
At first the climbers had eyes only for the ice and the mountains which lay in front of them, but presently Joe happened to look behind him down the valley, and there, far, far away, was the yellow prairie shining in the warm sunshine. Joe called the attention of the others to this, saying, “Don’t it look nice down there?”
The climb had taken much less time than had been anticipated, not that the height to which they had ascended had been less than they had thought, but because the way had been very direct and they had wasted little time in resting or loitering.
After their first view, Hugh led the way to a little grassy spot just outside of one of the moraines and, sitting down in a sheltered spot, said, “Let’s sit here and smoke a pipe, and then get up as high as we can and see the whole show; and then we can turn around and go back.” As they sat there they had a fine view of the valley below them.
“Isn’t it a fine thing, Hugh,” said Jack, “to get up here and see just how this glacier is acting? Don’t you remember how Mr. Fannin explained glaciers to us; how simple and easy he made it to understand how they acted? I don’t think I shall ever forget the way he talked about them, and I don’t think I shall ever see one without looking for the things that he explained to us.”
“Yes,” said Hugh, “that’s so, he sure did make things plain, and I don’t wonder that you remember what he said. I was thinking of him when we got up here, but one of the things that seems queerest to me about this ice is that it’s all made of snow. He said it was, and now we can see for ourselves that it is. I was looking as we came along, and you can see places just at the edges of the snow where it seems to be changing to ice. I guess the snow just gets solider and solider, and then gets water soaked and makes real ice.”
“Of course,” said Jack, “that must be it. When I was a small boy I used to make snow forts and defend them with snowballs, and sometimes the fellows would make the snowballs when the weather was warm and the snow was melting, and if it froze that night, they would be just solid ice. To get hit with one of those ice balls was a good deal like getting hit with a stone.”
“Well,” said Hugh, “I expect if no more snow fell up here this piece of ice would just melt away and leave nothing but the hole that it’s laying in—just a sort of a basin in the side of the mountain.”
“Yes,” said Jack, “I guess that’s so. I think that’s what Mr. Fannin told us; that a glacier was a glacier, because it was constantly being added to at its upper end, and the weight of the snow and ice was pushing it along over the mountainside. I take it that a snowbank might be ice at the bottom, perhaps, but that if it doesn’t move it isn’t a glacier.”