Transcription:
3 water-collecting basins behind them. Down at their bases where they were swept round to the South by the main trunk current,
is a large leveled field of moraine matter, which like all the drift deposits of the basin is planted by heavy, almost sunless
forest, composed of the mountain pine(Pinus monticola) and the two leaved pine (P. contorta) and the two firs (Picea amabilis
and P. grandis) the first of the silver firs and the two leaved pine predominating at this altitude, about 8500 ft above sea.
This forest is now on fire. I wished to pass through it this afternoon but feared the falling trees. As I stood watching the
flapping flames and estimating chances, a tall blazing pine crashed across the opening that I thought of passing, and in a
few minutes later two others fell. This stirred half a thought concerning special providences and made me go around out of
danger. The two leaved pine is very susceptible of fire even when green, because it grows in close grovey masses, and its
smooth thin bark is beaded and trickled with gum. The summit forests are made up almost entirely of this pine. Emerging from
this wooded moraine, I found a great number of loose separate boulders lying upon a polished hill-top which had formed a part
of the bottom of the main ice stream. Those boulders were of extraordinary size, some of them large as houses, and I started
Northward to seek the mountain from which they had been torn. I had moved but a short distance when I observed a deer feeding
in a strip of