GLACIAL FEATURES OF ST. CROIX DALLES REGION 245 



pretation of it as an outwash sheet formed when the glacier stood 

 hard against the western side of the St. Croix moraine. 



The surface of the plain is everywhere covered with a fine grayish- 

 brown loam, free from stones, which hides the stratified material. 

 The stratified deposits beneath are of variable thickness, from several 

 scores of feet, as shown by some of the wells, down to two or three 

 feet in road-cuts. While exposures are generally uncommon in the 

 outwash plain and good sections rare, a few of them reveal typical 

 red till underlying the sands and gravels. It is in these that the 

 difference in coloring of the stratified and non-stratified red drift is 

 so noticeable. Along some of the roads in this wide belt, red till 

 appears in some places without any stratified material in sight. These 

 patches are found to be above the level of the surrounding outwash 

 plain on slight eminences which escaped the depositing streamlets. 

 Such isolated hills of considerable size occur northeast of Poplar 

 Lake, and both north and south of Deer Lake. A feature which 

 quickly catches the eye is that on the ground-moraine areas large 

 bowlders are numerous, whereas they are nowhere to be seen on the 

 outwash plain. 



One of the pronounced features of the outwash is the pitted-plain 

 development. The pits are of varying dimensions, from depressions 

 in which there are small frog-ponds, up to deep hollows exceeding 

 a mile in length. Many of them contain lakes but many, even of 

 the large ones, do not. The several hundred which are large enough 

 to be represented on the map are pretty evenly distributed through- 

 out the plain, but it is reserved for Eureka Township, in the north- 

 east corner of the quadrangle, to display the most striking pitted- 

 plain spectacle. In this locality there is a splendid series of pits, 

 some of them of great size and as much as 100 feet deep. Their 

 steep sides drop rapidly from the plain in which they are sunk, and 

 the bottoms, instead of being flat, or basin-like, are very hummocky. 



The region southeast of the Dresser Junction gap is characterized 

 by a topography not usually seen in the midst of an outwash plain. 

 The question arises: Why do great depressions like the basins of 

 East, Horse, Round, and other similar lakes, exist with ground 

 moraine hills between, when even the hilltops are lower than the 

 level of the outwash plain to the north ? Horse Lake is but tw 



