Indeed, every feature is more or
less tellingly glacial. Not a peak, ridge, dome, canyon, yosemite,
lake-basin, stream or forest will you see that does not in some way
explain the past existence and modes of action of flowing, grinding,
sculpturing, soil-making, scenery-making ice. For, notwithstanding the
post-glacial agents--the air, rain, snow, frost, river, avalanche,
etc.--have been at work upon the greater portion of the Range for tens
of thousands of stormy years, each engraving its own characters more
and more deeply over those of the ice, the latter are so enduring and
so heavily emphasized, they still rise in sublime relief, clear and
legible, through every after-inscription. The landscapes of North
Greenland, Antarctica, and some of those of our own Alaska, are still
being fashioned beneath a slow-crawling mantle of ice, from a quarter
of a mile to probably more than a mile in thickness, presenting noble
illustrations of the ancient condition of California, when its sublime
scenery lay hidden in process of formation. On the Himalaya, the
mountains of Norway and Switzerland, the Caucasus, and on most of those
of Alaska, their ice-mantle has been melted down into separate glaciers
that flow river-like through the valleys, illustrating a similar past
condition in the Sierra, when every canyon and valley was the channel
of an ice-stream, all of which may be easily traced back to their
fountains, where some sixty-five or seventy of their topmost residual
branches still linger beneath protecting mountain shadows.
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