John Muir

“ Such are the canyons, ridges, and peaks themselves, the glacial peculiarities of whose trends and contours cannot be hid from the eye of the skilled observer until changes have been wrought upon them far more destructive than those to which these basin ranges have yet been subjected. ”

“ And because here the snow-fountains lay at a greater height, while the rock, an exceedingly hard quartzite, offered superior resistance to post-glacial agents, the ice-characters are on a larger scale, and are more sharply defined than any we have noticed elsewhere, and it is probably here that the last lingering glacier of the basin was located. The summits and connecting ridges are mere blades and points, ground sharp by the glaciers that descended on both sides to the main valleys. ”

“ The best preserved and most regular of the moraines are two laterals about two hundred feet in height and two miles long, extending from the foot of a magnificent canyon valley on the north side of the mountain and trending first in a northerly direction, then curving around to the west, while a well-characterized terminal moraine, formed by the glacier towards the close of its existence, unites them near their lower extremities at a height of eighty-five hundred feet. ”

“ It appears, therefore, that the last of the basin glaciers have but recently vanished, and that the almost innumerable ranges trending north and south between the Sierra and the Wahsatch Mountains were loaded with glaciers that descended to the adjacent valleys during the last glacial period, and that it is to this mighty host of ice streams that all the more characteristic of the present features of these mountain ranges are due. ”