near Mount Washington. 5 



the range is seen to be a gently swelling and sagging upland, 

 hardly Hat enough to call a table land or plateau, yet with 

 slopes so gradual as to excite attention from even a casual 

 visitor. The smooth "lawns" from which the several conical 

 summits rise gradually several hundred feet, find extension in 

 many places down the flanks of the range in graded spurs or 

 " ridges " which separate the deep " ravines " or " gulfs." 

 These profound hollows in the sides of the range, heading 

 sharply in crescentic precipices and stretching forward as broad 

 U-shaped troughs, are the dominant features of the range, add- 

 ing greatly to the impression of height which one gets when 

 viewing the mountains from below. If such " gulfs " occur at 

 all on the lower ranges of the White Mountains, they are at 

 least less striking there than on the Presidential Range. 



The greater part of the undulating upland is a bare gray 

 desert of loose rock and rifted ledges. Only its lower stretches 

 are invaded by the dense scrub of fir and spruce. The con- 

 tinuity of this upland surface across the saddles or cols of the 

 range from cone to cone, and the accordance of its surface on 

 opposite sides of the great ravines indicate, as Hitchcock and 

 others long ago recognized, that it originally extended over the 

 entire range and was interrupted only by the subdued moun- 

 tain summits. The intricately contorted structure of the schists 

 which compose the range indicates that the smooth upland 

 represents a vast amount of denudation, whereby the original 

 lofty mountains were reduced to broad, gently sloping forms, 

 surmounting a peneplain of great extent. The presumption is 

 that this is to be correlated with the Cretaceous peneplain of 

 southern New England.* The ravines have been hollowed 

 out of it since a general uplift of the region, first by normal 

 weathering and stream erosion and later by valley glaciers. 

 Foreign bowlders mingled with the loose rock of the upland 

 surface, polished and striated surfaces of vein quartz, and other 

 evidences of glaciation up even to the summits of Mounts Jef- 

 ferson, Adams and Washington, indicate, as Hitchcock dis- 

 covered in 1875, that the continental ice sheet completely 

 buried the range. Naturally certain changes of slope and out- 

 line are to be attributed to this regional glaciation ; but these 

 are much subordinate to the other features. In a sentence, 

 then, this range may be described as an irregular line of sub- 

 dued domes or cones, formed during a cycle of denudation 

 which baselevelled southern New England, but failed to 

 remove mountains here at the headwaters of the New England 

 rivers, subsequently raised, with the rest of New England, and 

 dissected on all sides by rejuvenated mountain torrents, then 



*W. M. Davis: The Physical Geography of Southern New England. 

 National Geographic Monographs, No. 9, 1895. 



