Vol. 4] Enopf-Thelen. — Geology of Mineral King. 



231 



of strings of rock-rimmed lakelets, and in the development of 

 splendid U-shaped valleys. The ideal character of the U-profile 

 of the main valleys — Cliff, Mineral King and Little Kern, has 

 been alluded to and the strong discordance between lateral and 

 main drainage pointed out. This lack of stream adjustment is 

 all the more remarkable when considered in the light of the 

 Pleistocene history of the range. The post-Pliocene uplift tilted 

 the Sierra Nevada orographic block to the west, the upheaval 

 in this portion of the range being not less than 10,000 feet, and 

 has thereby enormously accentuated the grade of the westward- 

 flowing streams. The drainage is still in the early consequent 

 stage, and the trunk streams have, in other portions of the range, 

 cut below their meridional tributaries and left them hung up. At 

 Mineral King, however, the orientation of the hanging valleys is 

 irregular and unsystematic. Deer Creek — a strike stream erod- 

 ing on clay slates and flowing north — is in poor adjustment to 

 Cliff Creek, a stream flowing westward on granites. The 

 streams heading respectively in Monarch, Crystal and Silver 

 Lakes, and plunging down to the Kaweah at an average 

 rate of 1,800 feet to the mile across the upturned edges of the 

 schists, afford strong examples of hanging valleys. The two 

 tributaries from the western side of the valley of Mineral King 

 have not yet succeeded in even gashing its wall. The valley in 

 these discordant relations to its lateral feeders is a strike valley 

 for the greater part of its length. Above its abrupt bend to 

 the west, it can be divided into two approximately equal por- 

 tions, a lower portion, which is veneered with glacial debris, 

 broad, flat-bottomed and of remarkable easy grade in spite of its 

 high altitude (7,800 feet) ; and an upper portion extending to 

 Farewell Gap, incised by post-glacial erosion, steeply graded, 

 but showing to some extent the step-like progression character- 

 istic of the lateral valleys. The transition between the two por- 

 tions is relatively abrupt, and is coincident with the entrance of 

 two lateral hanging valleys — Silver Lake on the eastern side, and 

 White Chief on the western. Below Mineral King the valley 

 cuts across the slates and schists into the granite, but does not 

 change its essential character, except that it becomes broader. 



