STEEP TRAILS 



or four miles long and terminates at an eleva- 

 tion of about nine thousand five hundred feet 

 above sea-level, in moraine-sprinkled ice-cliffs 

 sixty feet high. The long gray slopes leading 

 up to the glacier seem remarkably smooth and 

 unbroken. They are much interrupted, never- 

 theless, with abrupt, jagged precipitous gorges, 

 which, though offering instructive sections of 

 the lavas for examination, would better be 

 shunned by most people. This may be done 

 by keeping well down on the base until front- 

 ing the glacier before beginning the ascent. 



The gorge through which the glacier is 

 drained is raw-looking, deep and narrow, and 

 indescribably jagged. The walls in many 

 places overhang; in others they are beveled, 

 loose, and shifting where the channel has been 

 eroded by cinders, ashes, strata of firm lavas, 

 and glacial drift, teUing of many a change from 

 frost to fire and their attendant floods of mud 

 and water. Most of the drainage of the glacier 

 vanishes at once in the porous rocks to reappear 

 in springs in the distant valley, and it is only 

 in time of flood that the channel carries much 

 water; then there are several fine falls in the 

 gorge, six hundred feet or more in height. 

 Snow lies in it the year round at an elevation 

 of eight thousand five hundred feet, and in 

 sheltered spots a thousand feet lower. Trac- 



88 



