Post 03492
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An uprushing, explosive burst of flames from all sides wrapped and united on the summit. For a minute a storm of smoke and flame filled the heavens with riot. The wild, irresistible, cyclonic rush of fiery wind carried scores of tree-limbs and many blazing treetops hundreds of feet above the summit. Fire and sparks were hurled explosively outward, and a number of blazing treetops rushed off in gale-currents. One of these blazing tops dropped, a destructive torch, in a forest more than a mile distant from the summit!
High up in the Rocky Mountains are lakes which shine as brightly as dewdrops in a garden. These mountains are a vast hanging garden in which flowers and waterfalls, forests and lakes, slopes and terraces, group and mingle in lovely grandeur. Hundreds of these lakes and tarns rest in this broken topography. Though most of them are small, they vary in size from one acre to two thousand acres. Scores of these lakes have not been named. They form a harmonious part of the architecture of the mountains. Their basins were patiently fashioned by the Ice King. Of the thousand or more lakes in the Colorado mountains only a few are not glacial. The overwhelming majority rest in basins that were gouged and worn in solid rock by glaciers. John Muir says that Nature used the delicate snowflake for a tool with which to fashion lake-basins and to sculpture the mountains. He also says: “Every lake in the Sierra is a glacier lake. Their basins were not merely remodeled and scoured out by this mighty agent, but in the first place were eroded from the solid.” The Rocky Mountain lakes are set deep in cañons, mounted on terraces, and strung like uncut gems along alpine streams. The boulders in many of their basins are as clean and new as though just left by the constructive ice.
These lakes are scattered through the high mountains of Colorado, the greater number lying between the altitudes of ten thousand and twelve thousand feet. Few were formed above the altitude of twelve thousand, and most of those below ten thousand now are great flowerpots and hold a flower-illumined meadow or a grove. Timber-line divides this lake-belt into two nearly equal parts. Many are small tarns with rocky and utterly wild surroundings. Circular, elliptical, and long, narrow forms predominate. Some lie upon a narrow terrace along the base of a precipice. Many are great circular wells at the bottom of a fall; others are long and narrow, filling cañons from wall to wall.