STEEP TRAILS 



the entire basin, where the fine striae and 

 grooves have been obliterated, and most of 

 the moraines have been washed away, or so 

 modified as to be no longer recognizable, and 

 even the lakes and meadows, so characteristic 

 of glacial regions, have almost entirely van- 

 ished. For there are other monmnents, far 

 more enduring than these, remaining tens of 

 thousands of years after the more perishable 

 records are lost. Such are the canons, ridges, 

 and peaks themselves, the glacial pecuUari- 

 ties of whose trends and contours cannot be 

 hid from the eye of the skilled observer until 

 changes have been wrought upon them far 

 more destructive than those to which these 

 basin ranges have yet been subjected. 



It appears, therefore, that the last of the 

 basin glaciers have but recently vanished, and 

 that the almost innumerable ranges trending 

 north and south between the Sierra and the 

 Wahsatch Momitains were loaded with glaciers 

 that descended to the adjacent valleys during 

 the last glacial period, and that it is to this 

 mighty host of ice-streams that all the more 

 characteristic of the present features of these 

 mountain-ranges are due. 



But grand as is this vision delineated in 

 these old records, this is not all; for there is 

 not wanting evidence of a still grander glacia- 



190 



