And while searching the wide basin of the
San Joaquin, and trying to account for the absence of sequoia where
every condition seemed favorable for its growth, it occurred to me that
this remarkable gap in the sequoia belt fifty miles wide is located
exactly in the basin of the vast, ancient mer de glace of the San
Joaquin and Kings River basins which poured its frozen floods to the
plain through this gap as its channel. I then perceived that the next
great gap in the belt to the northward, forty miles wide, extending
between the Calaveras and Tuolumne groves, occurs in the basin of the
great ancient mer de glace of the Tuolumne and Stanislaus basins; and
that the smaller gap between the Merced and Mariposa groves occurs in
the basin of the smaller glacier of the Merced. The wider the ancient
glacier, the wider the corresponding gap in the sequoia belt.
Finally, pursuing my investigations across the basins of the Kaweah
and Tule, I discovered that the sequoia belt attained its greatest
development just where, owing to the topographical peculiarities of the
region, the ground had been best protected from the main ice-rivers that
continued to pour past from the summit fountains long after the smaller
local glaciers had been melted.
Taking now a general view of the belt, beginning at the south we see
that the majestic ancient glaciers were shed off right and left down the
valleys of Kern and Kings Rivers by the lofty protective spurs outspread
embracingly above the warm sequoia-filled basins of the Kaweah and Tule.
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