Lawson.1 



The Upper Kern Basin. 



353 



and heavily scored by the ice for several hundred feet above the 

 floor of the trough; but the surface so glaciated is very uneven 

 in detail, which unevenness is clearly due to the removal of joint 

 blocks by the glacier. The ice immediately flowed into the 

 reentrants formed by these removals, and glaciated the surface, 

 but failed to smooth out the unevenness. 



There are immense lateral moi-aines on both sides of Whitney 

 Creek. That on the north has a length of about five miles, and 

 its crest is probably a thousand feet above the floor of the glacial 

 trough. Its upper end begins at a point but little below the 

 mouth of the cirque to the northwest of Mt. Whitney. The 

 lateral moraine on the south side of Whitney Creek extends up 

 the south fork of the creek and has an observed length of about 

 three miles. It is crossed by the trail from Guyot to Crab tree 

 Meadows. The volume of these great lateral moraines is com- 

 parable to that of the cirques, and they doubtless represent the 

 bulk of the material removed from the cirques in the process of 

 their development by glacial erosion. This fact serves to explain 

 the small size of the terminal moraines of the trunk glacier in 

 Kern Caiion. It also illustrates the short distance of glacier 

 flow necessary for the englacial drift of the cirques to work out 

 to the surface and edges of the glacier. 



The next tributary glacier north of Whitney Creek was that 

 which came down the canon of the East Fork. This stream also 

 had two main branches, the more northerly being again the more 

 important, the ice stream taking its rise in the cirques at the base 

 of Mt. Tyndall and Mt. Barnard. The glacier from the south 

 branch of East Fork headed in a large cirque situated less than 

 a mile to the northwest of Mt. Whitney. The lateral moraines 

 of the East Fork are similar in character and extent to those of 

 Whitney Creek, and on both sides of the caiion were crossed by 

 the trail from Crabtree Meadows to the northern part of the 

 Kern Canon. 



Still farther north, at the head of the Upper Kern Basin, 

 there was a convergence of numerous ice streams toward the 

 main Kern Canon at the point where it is joined by Tyndall 

 Creek. These glaciers all headed in cirques which cluster about 

 the base of the high peaks stretching from Mt. Tyndall to Table 



