122 PROCEEDINGS OF THE ACADEMY OF [1899. 



seven feet. He also notes " that the snout of the glacier showed 

 evidence of retreat, for there were two rows of boulders in front of 

 it. The outer one, about sixty feet from the ice, seemed to have 

 been dropped the previous year; the inner row during the present 

 jear."^ 



Since that time the glacier has been visited by a number of per- 

 sons who have located the snout as respects certain marked rocks, 

 or in some other way, but in many instances the record has become 

 lost or uncertain so as to be of little value. At the present time 

 the glacier is rapidly receding, and from an examination of the 

 bare moraine and scrub below it, there seems to be evidence that 

 this has been going on actively for a comparatively short period. 



July 16, 1887 — one year before Dr. Green — we first visited 

 the glacier, and made a number of photographs of its foot (PI. 

 III). These photographs, after a lapse of over eleven years, make 

 possible an exceedingly interesting comparison of the position of 

 the ice. At the present time there is a broad space of loose 

 boulders below the snout, utterly devoid of vegetation. In 1887 

 alder bushes grew within twenty feet of the ice. The slope of 

 the ice was also very different from Avhat it is now. There was 

 then a great mass with steep sides extending over the present bare 

 space, while now the ice slopes comparatively evenly till it dies 

 away altogether in the stream. The fact that during eleven years 

 the alder bushes have not advanced on the retreat of the ice, and 

 that in 1887, when the photographs were taken, they were so close 

 to it, would seem to indicate that at least for a score of years pre- 

 vious to 1887 the glacier had not extended materially further into 

 the valley than it did at that time. Taking into consideration the 

 border moraine marking the position of the ice in 1887, the alder 

 bushes which then, as now, grew up to the lower side of the mo- 

 raine, and which have increased but little in size during the eleven 

 years, and the characteristic steepness of the slope of the ice, it 

 would seem probable that a period of advance had occurred shortly 

 before the year 1887. One very small moraine about 200 feet 

 from the snout of 1898 showed an insignificant advance since that 

 period, but apart from this the motion of the glacier appears to 

 have been only of recession. 



^ Among the Selkirk Glaciers, by W. S. Green. Macmillan & Co., 1890. 

 p. 219. 



