EXTINCT AND EXISTING GLACIERS OF COLORADO 65 



mile in diameter, at the head of a glaciated valley which drains into 

 the Big Thompson. The ice had recently shrunken from the latest 

 moraine, leaving a lake "rather less than one hundred yards in diam- 

 eter, upon which floated small icebergs." The moraine then rose 

 fifty feet or more above the level of the ice. ''The material of the ice- 

 field though somewhat granular on the surface, is not a mass of snow, 

 but a clear and compact ice." "The principal crevasse is curved so as 

 to be nearly parallel with the shore of the lakelet, and is not far from 

 one hundred feet back from it." Perhaps this is the bergschrund. 



The lower parts of the crevasses were filled with broken icicles, ice stalagmites, 

 etc., so that only from twenty to thirty feet can be seen. How much deeper the 

 crevasses really are, is not known; but, from the size and shape of the ice-field, 

 it does not seem probable that the greatest depth of ice exceeds fifty or seventy-five 

 feet. Above the main crevasse were two others large enough to be seen through 

 the recent snow. 



The ice in its movement converges to the lakelet. The width is 

 greater than the length. 



On the north side of the valley the ice reaches about two hundred feet further 

 down the valley (eastward) than on the south side, and it has also extended a 

 tongue of ice southward across the outlet of the lake, so that the outlet is by a 

 sub-glacial charmel. This tongue of ice is nearly one hundred feet wide, and rises 



six or eight feet above the lake The slopes of the ice are everywhere 



steep I saw no evident moraines and only two small pieces of rock on the 



ice anywhere. The cliffs around the head of the glacier are nowhere very high, 

 in places rising only a few feet above the ice, and they are surprisingly bare of 



loose fragments Some of the boulders in the lake come near the surface, 



and may be a recent terminal moraine. Perhaps a careful examination when the 

 ice is bare of recent snow may reveal moraines now forming; but, if so, they must 

 be small, since there is so little moraine-stuff being cast upon the ice. There are 

 several other "snow-fields" in the vicinity of Long's Peak which show some signs 

 of glacial flow They are aU ice rather than snow. 



The foregoing sketch is condensed from Stone's account. Emmons* 

 immediately objected to the designation of this ice-mass as a glacier, 

 justly saying, in brief, that neve looks more like ice than snow and that 

 "the other characters are decidedly those of the neve-^e\d rather than 

 of the glacier." Emmons is wrong, however, in urging that a lake 



> Emmons, S. F., "On Glaciers in the Rocky Mountains," Proc. Colo. Set. Soc, Vol. II, pp. 222-26, 1887 



