What to see in America . .A traveler can see much of interest in a days time, but ageneral acquaintance with the main features of the parkcan hardly be gained in less than a week. The park has in it one spot known as the Triple Divide,whence waters flow away into the Pacific Ocean, Hudson Bay,and the Gulf of Mexico. It has forty peaks with an altitudeof over 8000 feet, and four that are over 10,000 feet. Themountains are not of the gentle type, with flowing outlines,but rise like citadels, brusque and knurly and angular. Snowaccumulates only on the gentler slopes or in the highervalleys. Where
What to see in America . .A traveler can see much of interest in a days time, but ageneral acquaintance with the main features of the parkcan hardly be gained in less than a week. The park has in it one spot known as the Triple Divide,whence waters flow away into the Pacific Ocean, Hudson Bay,and the Gulf of Mexico. It has forty peaks with an altitudeof over 8000 feet, and four that are over 10,000 feet. Themountains are not of the gentle type, with flowing outlines,but rise like citadels, brusque and knurly and angular. Snowaccumulates only on the gentler slopes or in the highervalleys. Where it has increased sufficiently, pressure hasturned the lower parts to ice, and in such instances as theweight is sufficient this ice becomes a glacier and creepsslowly downward, flowing as if it were plastic. At a suddendescent, where a river would leap as a waterfall, a glacierbreaks across in fissures that may be several feet wide andhundreds of feet long, and these crevasses go down to blue- 348 What to See in America. black depths that areappalling to the inexperi-enced climber. As theglacier advances thecrevasses are bent out ofshape and maybe crossedby fresh crevasses thatsplit the ice into wildlumps and pinnacles. Onsuch days as the sunshines warmly the icemelts, and by afternoontorrents of pale bluewater are racing downover the frozen surfaceand here and there plung-ing into a crevasse. Atlength the water makesits way to the bottom, and then roars along through an icetunnel to the end of the glacier. Debris quarried by frost from the bordering mountain sidesoften buries the edges of the glacier, and is carried of rock as large as cottages are occasionally thustransported. When the mass of stony material arrives wherethe melting of the glacier is complete, it is piled up in amoraine. Beneath the glacier, fragments of stone frozeninto the bottom of the ice gouge and scour the rocky channeland grind both themselves and the surface over which theymove into the
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Keywords: ., bookauthorjohnsonc, bookcentury1900, bookdecade1910, bookyear1919
