90 THE MOUNTAINS OF CALIFOBNIA 



Moraine Lake furnishes an equally interesting 

 example of a basin formed wholly, or in part, by a 

 terminal moraine dam curved across the path of 

 a stream between two lateral moraines. 



At Moraine Lake the canon proper terminates, 

 although apparently continued by the two lateral 

 moraines of the vanished glacier. These moraines 

 are about 300 feet high, and extend unbrokenly 

 from the sides of the canon into the plain, a dis 

 tance of about five miles, curving and tapering in 

 beautiful lines. Their sunward sides are gardens, 

 their shady sides are groves; the former devoted 

 chiefly to eriogona3, composite, and graminse ; a 

 square rod containing five or six profusely flowered 

 eriogonums of several species, about the same 

 number of bahia and linosyris, and a few grass 

 tufts ; each species being planted trimly apart, with 

 bare gravel between, as if cultivated artificially. 



My first visit to Bloody Canon was made in the 

 summer of 1869, under circumstances well calcu 

 lated to heighten the impressions that are the pe 

 culiar offspring of mountains. I came from the 

 blooming tangles of Florida, and waded out into the 

 plant-gold of the great valley of California, when 

 its flora was as yet untrodden. Never before had 

 I beheld congregations of social flowers half so ex 

 tensive or half so glorious. Golden composite 

 covered all the ground from the Coast Eange to 

 the Sierra like a stratum of curdled sunshine, in 

 which I reveled for weeks, watching the rising and 

 setting of their innumerable suns; then I gave 

 myself up to be borne forward on the crest of the 

 summer wave that sweeps annually up the Sierra 

 and spends itself on the snowy summits. 



