556 HISTORY OF PASADENA. 



down the Canj^ada valley, and meeting a lesser one from the Arroyo valley 

 at their point of junction. And I have not seen, nor heard, nor read of, 

 nor been able to suggest any other movements in nature which could have 

 done this particular piece of work. Just why there is not more of it here I 

 cannot say ; but I believe a great deal more of it once existed, and was 

 cracked, peeled, disintegrated, worn and washed away by the action of the 

 elements in after time, these being only a few specimens which chanced to 

 remain to tell the story ; for as Prof. IvcConte says, "The destruction of these 

 surfaces by scaling is in fact continually going on." 



Water Carvings. — There are several smoothly worn troughs or 

 chutes and other peculiar shapings which were produced by the scouring 

 action of sand, gravel, cobble-stones, etc., carried along by running water. 

 The most conspicuous and well-marked specimen of this class is the turban 

 rock, in shape and position something like a small Moorish dome — and now 

 so ruthlessly daubed over with advertisements that a good photo of it can- 

 not be obtained without its being marred by the impertinence of paint. 

 When this particular job of water-carving was done, the outlet of a moun- 

 tain footlake in the Canyada and Arroyo above flowed here, at the eleva- 

 tion marked by these fluvial mementos on the rocks ; but the stream has 

 since worn its channel to a bed fifty or sixty feet deeper down. In my 

 researches of months and years among our mountain canyons, I have ob- 

 served scores of cases of the water carving work, for it is still going on 

 every year ; but I have not yet found examples of either slickensides or 

 glacial enamelings except those at Devil's Gate. The geological indications 

 are th'at there was a great pre-glacial river sweeping down from Tejunga, 

 Canyada and the Arroyo southeasterly across Pasadenaland to the San Gabriel 

 river, with Rubio, Eaton, Santa Anita, and many lesser canyons as feeders 

 from the mountain slopes. During the period of the great lava flows in 

 North California and beyond, there were intense meteorological disturb- 

 ances, with torrential floods more powerful and destructive than anything 

 known within man's historic period ; and it was in this age of surface 

 changes that our ancient river bed became filled up many hundreds of feet 

 deep with boulders, cobblestones, coarse sand and gravel, swept down from 

 the disintegrating mountain fractures by oft-repeated cloudbursts and terrific 

 storms. But in the closing of the glacial period the action was of a more 

 steady, gradual and gentle type. The yearly increase of ice and impacted 

 snow was piled up in the shaded mountain gorges, with dust, breccia, 

 boulders, sand, clay — everything that was shed by the mountain peaks, 

 ridges, slopes, ledges and gorges, being incorporated promiscuously with the 

 accumulating ice and yearly snow-pack. This vast body of congealed water, 

 with its varied burden of solid materials within its bulk and on its surface, 

 moved slowly down the outlets, it may have been an inch a day, or a foot in a 



