LOOKING ACROSS THE LAKE TO WIZARD ISLAND
There you see is the top of that little volcano—right across the lake. It is known as "Wizard Island." The lake is 4,000 feet deep. Its walls are 1,500 feet high; in some places over 2,000 feet high. In spite of the fact that they, as you see, slope a good deal, owing to the crumbling down of the weathered rock, the banks are still so steep it has taken us several hours of careful climbing to get down where this picture was taken, and we shall be all the rest of the forenoon climbing back again.
In addition to making lakes in their Great Lakes manner the glaciers had other methods. A glacier coming into a dry mountain valley would supply it with a river by melting, and at the same time dam up the river with stones and soil brought down from the mountain and so make a lake. Then the water would run over the brim of the dam, and the thing was complete; a beautiful little lake with one river running into it and another running out.
LOOKS AS IF IT HAD RAINED LAKES!
You just go through Wisconsin or Minnesota or Maine, and right and left you'll see lakes and lakes and lakes: and then more lakes! Of course most of these lakes are small; otherwise it wouldn't have been possible to work so many of them into the same landscape. In Wisconsin you find these small lakes in what are called the "Kettle Ranges." The low hills and their valleys form what the early settlers called "kettles," and in these kettles are the little blue-eyed lakes.
It was the glaciers that not only made the kettles but often filled them with the lakes. In many of the mounds of pebbles and clay that we read about in "The Secrets of the Hills," the glaciers left big blocks of ice. Then, when this ice melted, two things happened: (1) The covering of the ice sank down, much as the sawdust sinks in an ice-house when a block of ice is taken out, thus making the kettle; (2) the big ice cake in the hill of pebbles melted, so filling the kettle with a lake.
But what broke off these big blocks, these land icebergs that made the basins for the kettle lakes? They were left by the glacier when it began to retreat; that is to say when the supply of snow back at the gathering ground became insufficient to keep pushing it forward as fast as the front melted away. Melting most rapidly in those huge cracks called crevasses, big blocks were finally separated entirely from the main body and left behind as the rest of the glacier slowly melted back toward the mountains.
If the glaciers were thus responsible for most of the lakes of the lowlands you may be sure they had a hand in making the lakes of the mountains, right where they themselves live. John Muir, who spent his life in loving study of the mountains of the West and of everything connected with them, found mountain lakes in every stage of existence up the mountainsides; empty stone bowls that showed by the work of the waves on the rocks that they had once held lakes; above these, in the same chain, lakes growing shallow; and, still higher, brand new lakes in stone bowls with the edge of the glacier that had carved out the bowl and filled it with blue water, still bordering it on the upper side.
