Page:Canadian Alpine Journal I, 1.djvu/225

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
150
Canadian Alpine Journal

The results of their labors—and a good deal of it has been hard work—are set forth in a number of monographs written for the proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia and for "Appalachia," the publication of the Appalachian Mountain Club of Boston, and subsequently issued as excerpt copies.

The expedition of Dr. Sherzer was made in 1904, supplemented by additional observations in 1905. He applied his investigations to five glaciers: The Victoria, Wenkchema and Yoho in the Main range, and the Illecillewaet and Asulkan glaciers in the Selkirk range. The account of his surveys and observations is given to the public in a most instructive and splendidly illustrated monograph, reprinted from Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections (Quarterly issue), Volume 47, Part 4, No. 1567. In it Dr. Sherzer gives a description of the several glaciers, their sources, surroundings, action and general characteristics, and draws most interesting and conclusive deductions from his notes. The theory here advanced that the origin of "Block moraines" is due to seismic disturbance, is valuable in view of the fact that, at the present date, no snowfield or glacier in either range carries a load of rock fragments of sufficient size to form moraines similar to those studied by Dr. Sherzer under that name. The moraines referred to were found at no great distance from the ice-tongues of the Victoria, Wenkchema and Illecillewaet glaciers.

Owing to close proximity of the Club's annual camp for 1906, the Yoho glacier was the first taken up, and the initial work last summer is now set forth:

The triangular elevated area of mountain peaks and ridges bounded on the eastern side by the trough of the Bow and Mistaya rivers, on the western side by the trough of the Amiskwi river. Blaeberry river and Middle Fork of the Saskatchewan river, and on the