SECTION OF BURNS EIDGE. 187 



slope seems to indicate that they were mostly stranded there while ice yet 

 remained beneath this deposit and prevented its entire submergence in the 

 lake. The thickness of this esker is at least nearly 100 feet; for a well 45 

 feet deep, dug at the bottom of the excavation, was wholly in the same 

 formation of gravel and sand. It is thus known to extend considerably 

 below the level of the Red River Valley plain, which consists of fluvial 

 and lacvistrine clay underlain at a slight depth by till. A section across 

 the esker and plain (fig. 10) would show till abutting upon the edge of the 

 gravel and sand, indicating that both the stratified esker and the upper 

 part of the till were formed from englacial drift. 



Smaller esker deposits were observed in townships 12 and 13, range 1 

 east, 10 to 20 miles northwest of Winnipeg. Beginning ab(iut 3 miles east 

 of Rosser, a narrow and occasionally inteiTupted belt of esker gravel and 

 sand, with frequent bowlders scattered on the surface, extends northwest 

 diagonally across sections 10, 16, and 20, the northeast corner of section 

 19, and the southwest part of section 30, township 12, and thence west- 

 ward through section 25 of the next township. Its highest portions rise 

 10 to 25 feet above the depressions of the moderately undulating sin-face 

 of till on each side and are 800 to 810 feet above the sea. Along a distance 

 of about a third of a mile in section 30 it has the form and character of an 

 ordinary beach ridge and is destitute of bowlders. A similar low esker 

 crosses sections 12 and 14, township 13, trending from southeast to north- 

 west; and others occur in the vicinity of the Grosse Isle, a name applied 

 to poplar groves in sections 17 and 18 of this township and in sections 12 

 and 13 of the next west. 



From the east ])art of the Grosse Isle a notable esker, known as Burns 

 Ridge, runs north-northwestward across sections 30 and 31, township 13, 

 range 1 east. Five miles west of Stonewall a section of this little lieach- 

 like ridge was made in section 30 by the original line of the Canadian 

 Pacific Railwav, which wrs abandoned for the more southern route by way 

 of Winnipeg. The esker is cut to a depth of 8 feet by the railway and to 

 12 feet in an excavation on the south side of the railway grade. A well 

 in the lowest part of this excavation goes 4 feet deeper, to a total of 16 

 feet below the crest of the ridge. The entire section consists of stratified 



