424 W. UPHAM ESKER NEAR WINNIPEG, MANITOBA 



above the sea. Exact leveling from Birds Hill Station seems desirable 

 to ascertain the heights of these shorelines. Until this test shall be 

 applied, I think the eastern sandy beach to be at or near 780 to 785 feet, 

 and the western and less conspicuous beach probably several feet lower. 



Other Esker and Kame Deposits in the Vicinity 



Township 12 north, range 5 east, from 4 to 12 miles east and north- 

 east of Birds Hill Station, has numerous esker ridges, shorter hills, and 

 extended plateaus of gravel and sand, from 50 to 100 feet above inter- 

 vening swamps, parts of which are well wooded with spruce and tama- 

 rack. The uplands, forming plateaus, esker s, and kames, are largely 

 prairie, but in some tracts are scantily wooded with scrubby oaks, else- 

 where with a better growth of poplars, and eastward have a few white 

 pines. 



One of the most conspicuous of these elevations, as viewed from the 

 west, is called Griffiths Hill, on the township plat in the Dominion Lands 

 Office at Winnipeg, drafted in 1872 from the original surveys. The top 

 of this hill, in the northeast quarter of section 19, is about 875 feet above 

 the sea, or a little more than 100 feet above the railway, 2 miles distant 

 on the west. 



The whole group is composed of gravel and sand, and the topographic 

 forms indicate deposition by glacial rivers near their mouths, where they 

 flowed between walls of ice, being here and there divided by ice-islands, 

 whose melting left the hills, ridges, and plateaus bounded by moderately 

 steep slopes. With the completion of the melting of the ice about and 

 beneath these deposits, they sank to the bottom of Lake Agassiz. Toward 

 the north, west, and southwest they border on the fiat plain of the Red 

 River valley, 750 to 760 feet above the sea, while toward the east and 

 southeast they are connected with plains and imdulating tracts of gravel 

 and sand which extend with slow and gradual ascent to the Lake of the 

 Woods and into Minnesota. 



About 21/2 miles east from the east end of the esker of Birds Hill is 

 the Moose Nose, a conspicuous rounded hill, mainly composed, so far as 

 can be seen on the surface, of modified drift — that is, the gravel and 

 sand brought and deposited by a glacial river. This massive kame covers 

 an area about two-thirds of a mile in diameter, in the west part of section 

 29 and the east half of section 30, township 11 north, range 5 east. The 

 kame deposit surmounts a larger somewhat elevated oval area of typical 

 till, which comprises most of the eastern two-thirds of section 30 and 

 continues south in the north half of the northeast quarter of section 19, 



