Studies in the Sierra. No. VII. - Mountain Building.

• Main Author: Muir, John
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: Scholarly Commons 1921
• Subjects: Environmentalist; naturalist; travel; conservation; national parks; John Muir; history; pamphlets; journal articles; speeches; writing; annotation; Indian; Ice Sheet
• Online Access: https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/jmb/416; https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/context/jmb/article/1415/viewcontent/361.pdf

STUDIES IN THE SIERRA* By John Muir no. vii. mountain-building * THIS study of mountain-building refers particularly to that portion of the range embraced between latitudes 36┬░ 3o' and 30┬░. It is about 200 miles long, sixty wide, and attains an elevation along its axis of from 8000 to nearly 15,000 feet above the level of the sea. The individual mountains that are distributed over this vast area, whether the lofty and precipitous alps of the summit, the more beautiful and highly specialized domes and mounts dotted over the undulating flanks, or the huge bosses and angles projecting horizontally from the sides of canons and valleys, have all been sculptured and brought into relief during the glacial epoch by the direct mechanical action of the ice-sheet, with the individual glaciers into which it afterward separated. Our way to a general understanding of all this has been made clear by previous studies of valley formationsΓÇöstudies of the physical characters of the rocks out of which the mountains under consideration have been made, and of the widely contrasted methods and quantities of glacial and post-glacial denudation. Notwithstanding the accessibility and imposing grandeur of the summit alps, they remain almost wholly unexplored. A few nervous raids have been made among them from random points adjacent to trails, and some of the more easily accessible, such as mounts Dana, Lyell, Tyndall, and Whitney, have been ascended, while the vast wilderness of mountains in whose fastnesses the chief tributaries of the San Joaquin and Kings rivers take their rise, have been beheld and mapped from a distance, without any attempt at detail. Their echoes are never stirred even by the hunter's rifle, for there is no game to tempt either Indian or white man as far as the frosty lakes and meadows that lie at their bases, while their avalanche-swept and crevassed glaciers, their labyrinths of yawning gulfs and crumbling precipices, offer dangers that only powerful motives will induce anyone to face. ΓÇóReprinted from The ...