4 J. W. Goldthwait — Glacial Cirques 



records of extinct White Mountain glaciers, instead of being 

 ascribed to " the action of frost, gravity and water power."* 



With much skepticism as to the existence of local glaciers in 

 the lower, outer portion of the White Mountains region as 

 reported by others, yet with a growing conviction, based on 

 photographs and maps, that satisfactory evidences of local 

 glaciers might be found near Mount Washington, I made plans 

 last summer for a field study of this problem. Accompanied 

 by Mr. Fred B. Plummer, a graduate student at Dartmouth 

 College, and Mr. W. Lee White, Dartmouth 1912, I spent 

 six weeks on and around the " Northern Peaks " of the Presi- 

 dential Range, gathering physiographic and geologic data, col- 

 lecting photographs, and constructing a topographic map of 

 two of the ravines. So far as our observations bear directly 

 upon the local glaciation of the range by valley glaciers they 

 will be briefly sketched in the pages which follow. The con- 

 clusions reached are : that prior to the advance of the conti- 

 nental ice sheet over the White Mountains, either early in the 

 last glacial epoch or during a still earlier epoch, the Presidential 

 Range was covered by a snow field from which for a consider- 

 able time several vigorous valley glaciers were nourished ; that 

 the range later became completely buried by the ice sheet from 

 Canada ; and that upon the final melting away of the conti- 

 nental ice from the mountains in question, the local glaciers 

 did not again come into existence. In this last respect our 

 conclusions contradict not only the opinion held by Agassiz, 

 Hitchcock and other early investigators in New Hampshire, 

 but that held by Tarr in Maine. 



It would be unfitting even in so short a paper to fail to 

 acknowledge the aid which I have received in this field work 

 from the Appalachian Mountain Club, whose scores of well 

 constructed mountain trails and paths have made the range 

 easily accessible and whose readiness to further any form of 

 scientific work which reveals new facts of natural history in 

 these White Mountains I am not the first to appreciate. I am 

 indebted also to Mr. Guy Shorey of G-orham, N. H., for the 

 use of the three photographs which accompany this paper. 



General Physiographic Description of the Presidential Range. 



The Presidential Range is a crooked and broken line of 

 mountains that extends from Randolph, New Hampshire, 

 southward about twenty miles to Bartlett. Mount Washing- 

 ton, the dominating summit, with an altitude of 6,293 feet, 

 stands about midway between the two ends of the range. 

 When viewed from one of the summits, the general surface of 



*C. H. Hitchcock : Geology of New Hampshire, vol. i, p. 623, 1874. 



