12 GUIDEBOOK OF THE WESTERN UNITED STATES. 



around and double back upon itself, thus zigzagging its way up the 

 mountain slope. The train climbs steadily upward, and one by one 

 the ridges that from below seemed to be of great height are sur- 

 mounted and they are found to be only low spurs of the still higher 

 mountains above. 



As the train nears the summit and encircles the little pond called 

 Yankee Doodle Lake, the traveler may see some of the effects, other 

 than the rounding of valleys, that the old glaciers have produced on 

 the mountain scenery. In the canyons below, where the ice moved 

 down in a great stream from the heights above, its effect was to 

 smooth and round the slopes and to do away with much of the 

 ruggedness that must have marked these canyons before they were 

 occupied by the ice. Near the summit the ice scooped out in the side, 

 of the mountain great amphitheaters, called cirques, making the 

 tops much more rugged than they were before. The circular depres- 

 sion that holds Yankee Doodle Lake is such a cirque, and all the vast 

 rock slopes above the lake have been steepened by undercutting by 

 the ice. Other cirques (such as those shown in PI. V) may be seen 

 in the mountains ; indeed, the entire front above this place, up which 

 the railroad finds its way to the summit, consists of the walls of 

 cirques that have uaited. The steepness of this slope is due almost 

 entirely to the action of ice. In places the road is constructed along 

 the upper edge of one of these great cirque walls, and the traveler 

 may look down on the right nearly 1,000 feet into the cirque below. 

 Although the cliff has an appreciable slope, it appears to be vertical 

 especially when viewed from the moving train. 



At last the traveler reaches the summit, at Corona, 11,680 feet 

 above the level of the sea, but the great snowsheds through which the 

 train passes have prevented him from getting a fair view of the 

 mountain summit. As soon as the train stops at Corona he may pass 

 from the confinement of the snowshed and enjoy to the utmost the 

 boundless space of the mountain top. On the crest in any direction 

 there are peaks higher than Corona, the most prominent being James 

 Peak (13,260 feet) on the south and Longs Peak (14,255 feet) on the 

 north, but they can be seen from only a few points. On the west 

 the traveler can look down on the billowy surface of Middle Park, 

 one of the surface basins in the midst of the mountains ; and on the 

 east he can look over the wide expanse of spur and ravine up which 

 the train has so laboriously climbed. 



The railroad beyond Corona descends the fairly smooth western 

 slope of the Front Range by many loops and turns until it reaches 

 the floor of Middle Park. It crosses this immense basin in the heart 

 of the mountains, cuts through the Gore or Park Range beyond in a 

 deep, rugged canyon, and then continues westward across the great 

 plateau country of northwestern Colorado. The plateau contains 



