The path of the vanished glacier shone in many places as
if washed with silver, and pushing up the canyon on this bright road
I passed lake after lake in solid basins of granite and many a meadow
along the canyon stream that links them together. The main lateral
moraines that bound the view below the canyon are from a hundred to
nearly two hundred feet high and wonderfully regular, like artificial
embankments covered with a magnificent growth of silver fir and pine.
But this garden and forest luxuriance is speedily left behind, and
patches of bryanthus, cassiope and arctic willows begin to appear. The
small lakes which a few miles down the Valley are so richly bordered
with flowery meadows have at an elevation of 10,000 feet only small
brown mats of carex, leaving bare rocks around more than half their
shores. Yet, strange to say, amid all this arctic repression the
mountain pine on ledges and buttresses of Red Mountain seems to find the
climate best suited to it. Some specimens that I measured were over a
hundred feet high and twenty-four feet in circumference, showing hardly
a trace of severe storms, looking as fresh and vigorous as the giants of
the lower zones. Evening came on just as I got fairly into the main
canyon. It is about a mile wide and a little less than two miles long.
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