Post 00272
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Water and ice are incessantly at work tearing down the heights. Water undermines by washing away the softer parts and by leaching. Every winter ice thrusts its expansive wedge into each opening. Places are so shattered by this explosive action that thousands of gallons of water are admitted. This collects in openings, and the following winter the freezing and forcing continues. During the winter the irresistible expansion of freezing water thus pushes the rocks and widens the openings with a force that is slow but powerful. Winter by winter rocks are moved; summer by summer the water helps enlarge the opening. Years or centuries go by, and at last during a rainy time or in the spring thaw a mass slips away or falls over. This may amount to only a few pounds, or it may be a cliff or even a mountain-side.
The long ice-ages of the earth appear to have their sway, go, and return. These alternate with long climatic periods made up of the short winters and the other changing seasons such as we know. The glacier lake is slowly created, but an avalanche may blot it out the day after it is completed. Other lakes more favorably situated may live on for thousands of years. But every one must eventually pass away. These lakes come into existence, have a period of youth, maturity, and declining years; then they are gone forever. They are covered over with verdure–covered with beauty–and forgotten.
Our stage in the San Juan Mountains had just gained the top of the grade when an alert, riderless pony trotted into view on a near-by ridge. Saddled and bridled, she was returning home down a zigzag trail after carrying a rider to a mine up the mountain-side. One look at this trim, spirited “return horse” from across a narrow gorge, and she disappeared behind a cliff.