Identifier: ournationalparks1909muir (find matches)
Title: Our national parks
Year: 1909 (1900s)
Authors: Muir, John, 1838-1914 author
Subjects: National parks and reserves
Publisher: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Company
Contributing Library: Harold B. Lee Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Brigham Young University

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of this ice-burnished dome, oneof many adorning this wonderful park. In making the ascent, one finds that the curveof the base rapidly steepens, until one is indanger of slipping ; but feldspar crystals, two orthree inches long, that have been weathered intorelief, afford slight footholds. The summit isin part burnished, like the sides and base, thestriae and scratches indicating that the mightyTuolumne Glacier, two or three thousand feetdeep, overwhelmed it while it stood firm like aboulder at the bottom of a river. The pres-sure it withstood must have been enormous.Had it been less solidly built, it would have beenground and crushed into moraine fragments, likethe general mass of the mountain flank in whichat first it lay imbedded; for it is only a hard re-sidual knob or knot with a concentric structureof superior strength, brought into relief by theremoval of the less resisting rock about it, — anillustration in stone of the survival of the strong-est and most favorably situated.
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GLACIER MONUMENT (FAIRVIEW DOME) THE YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK 89 Hardly less wonderful, when we contemplatethe storms it has encountered since first it sawthe light, is its present unwasted condition. Thewhole quantity of postglacial wear and tear ithas suffered has not diminished its stature a sin-gle inch, as may be readily shown by measuringfrom the level of the unchanged polished por-tions of the surface. Indeed, the average post-glacial denudation of the entire region, measuredin the same way, is found to be less than twoinches, — a mighty contrast to that of the ice ;for the glacial denudation here has been not lessthan a mile ; that is, in developing the presentlandscapes, an amount of rock a mile in averagethickness has been silently carried away by flow-ing ice during the last glacial period. A few erratic boulders nicely poised on therounded summit of the monument tell an inter-esting story. They came from a mountain onthe crest of the range, about twelve miles to theeastwar

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