Post 02448
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Many times camp was so situated that splendid sunsets or the lingering pink and silver afterglow were at their best behind a broken sky-line ridge. My camp-fire was reflected in the lake, which often sparkled as if enamel-filled with stars. Across one corner lay softly the inverted Milky Way. Shooting stars passed like white rockets through the silent waters. The moon came up big and yellow from behind a crag and in the lake became a disc of gold. Many a night the cliffs repeated the restlessness of the wind-shaken water until the sun quieted all with light. During the calm nights there were hours of almost unbroken silence, though at times and faintly a far-off waterfall could be heard, the bark of a fox sounded across the lake, or the weird and merry cries of the coyote were echoed and reëchoed around the shore. More often the white-crowned sparrow sang hopefully in the night. Morning usually was preceded by a horizon of red and rose and gold. Often, too, vague sheep and deer along the farther shore were slowly developed into reality by the morning light. From all around birds came to bathe and drink, and meet in morning song service.
These lakes, if frozen during calm times, have ice of exceeding clearness and smoothness. In early winter this reflects peak, cloud, and sky with astonishing faithfulness. In walking across on this ice when the reflective condition was at its best, I have marveled at my reflection, or that of Scotch, my dog, walking on what appeared to be the surface of the water. The lakes above timber-line are frozen over about nine months of the year, some of them even longer. Avalanches of snow often pile upon them, burying them deeply.
Gravity and water are filling with débris and sediment these basins which the glaciers dug. Many lakes have long since faded from the landscape. The earthy surface as it emerges above the water is in time overspread with a carpet of plushy sedge or grass, a tangle of willow, a grove of aspen, or a forest of pine or spruce. The rapidity of this filling is dependent on a number of things,–the situation of the lake, the stability of the watershed, its relation to forests, slopes, meadows, and other lakes, which may intercept a part of the down-coming sediment or wreckage. This filling material may be deposited evenly over the bottom, the lake steadily becoming shallower, though maintaining its original size, with its edge clean until the last; or it may be heaped at one end or piled along one side. In some lakes the entering stream builds a slowly extending delta, which in time gains the surface and extends over the entire basin. In other lakes a side stream may form an expanding dry delta which the grass, willows or aspens eagerly follow outward and cover long before water is displaced from the remainder of the lake’s rock-bound shores. With many, the lower end of the basin, shallow from the first, is filled with sediment and changed to meadow, while the deep upper end lies almost unchanged in its rock basin. Now and then a plunging landslide forms an island, on which the spruces and firs make haste to wave triumphant plumes. Lake Agnes on the northern slope of Mt. Richthofen was formed with a rounded dome of glaciated rock remaining near the centre. This lake is being filled by the slow inflow of a “rock stream.”