288 J. W. GOLDTHWAIT GLACIATION IN THE WHITE MOUNTAINS 



"About half a mile above Bethlehem station the valley is almost closed 

 by a large hill of till, with some stratfhed layers on the outside. This 

 eminence resembles a moraine." 25 The State highway ascends this hill 

 just east of Bethlehem Junction. Good sections of the deposit are to be 

 seen both by the side of the road and by the railroad. It is a rather 

 smooth-topped mass of boulder-clay, capped on the northwest with cross- 

 bedded sands and gravels which make low sags and swells. Instead of a 

 terminal moraine built by a local glacier moving westward, this appears 

 to be an imperfectly constructed moraine built at the front of an ice- 

 sheet which moved southward. The drift composing it seems to have 

 come from northern sources, and the strise of the region nowhere run 

 east and west, as a local Ammonoosuc glacier would do, but southward, 

 in the same direction as the dispersion of stones. 



Hitchcock's argument for a local glacier in the Ammonoosuc Valley 

 closes with a brief description of recently formed landslide deposits on 

 Little River. So far as I can see, it throws no light on the problem. As 

 already stated, over steepened slopes have resulted at many places in the 

 White Mountains from regional (not local) glaciation. 



In his paper of 1904 Doctor Upham reports that he saw 



"characteristic narrow valley moraines only near the old White Mountain 

 House within 20 to 30 rods north and west from it, about one mile west of the 

 Fabyan House. These little ridges of drift, parallel and four or five in num- 

 ber, well strewn with boulders, rise five to ten feet above the nearly level 

 ground, and extend from north to south, transverse to the Ammonoosuc Valley, 

 at its northern side. Other valley moraines were looked for, but were nowhere 

 seen, in the distance of about 6 miles eastward to the foot of the steep west 

 side of Mount Washington, where it is ascended by the railway." 26 



The little ridges near the White Mountain House were thus accepted 

 as evidence of Hitchcock's Ammonoosuc glacier. Observations in this 

 district in 1915 have led me to believe, on the contrary, that the deposits 

 mark a stage of recession of the Canadian ice-sheet. A brief description 

 of them follows : 



Immediately north and west of the White Mountain House is a smooth 

 tract of ground, rising but slightly above the level of the adjoining in- 

 tervals and occupied by a hayfleld. Just west of this field, in the next 

 piece of property, are the drift ridges described by Upham. Near the 

 railroad an open pasture allows their peculiar forms to be plainly seen, 

 but a few hundred yards north of the railroad second-growth forest par- 

 tially conceals them, and the work of tracing their courses northward is 



25 Loc. cit. 

 - 6 Op. cit, p. 12. 



