But the snow does not fall alone on the western cirques.  It discharges with such prodigality, and the wind demands its release with such precipitancy, that it lodges in equally vast masses on the eastern slopes of the Crystal Range.  For, while the eastern side of this range is steep enough to be termed in general parlance “precipitous,” it has a decided slope when compared with the sheer drop of the western side.  Here the configuration and arrangement of the rock-masses also have created a number of cirques, where remnants of the winter’s snow masses are yet to be seen.  These snow masses are baby glaciers, or snow being slowly manufactured into glaciers, or, as some authorities think, the remnants of the vast glaciers that once covered this whole region with their heavy and slowly-moving icy cap.

On the Tallac Range the snow fell heavily toward Desolation Valley, but also on the steep and precipitous slopes that faced the north.  So also with the Angora Range.  Its western exposure, however, is of a fairly gentle slope, so that the snow was blown over to the eastern side, where there are several precipitous cirques of stupendous size for the preservation of the accumulated and accumulating snow.

Now let us, in imagination, ascend in a balloon over this region and hover there, seeking to reconstruct, by mental images, the appearance it must have assumed and the action that took place in the ages long ago.

Snow, thirty, fifty, one hundred or more feet deep lay, on the level, and on the mountain slopes or in precipitous cirques twice, thrice, or ten times those depths.  Snow thus packed together soon changes its character.  From the light airy flake, it becomes, in masses, what the geologists term neve.  This is a granular snow, intermediate between snow and ice.  A little lower down this neve is converted into true glacial ice-beds, which grow longer, broader, deeper and thicker as the neve presses down from above.

Lay minds conceive of these great ice-beds of transformed snow as inert, immovable bodies.  They think the snow lies upon the surface of the rocks or earth.  The scientific observer knows better.  By the very inertia of its own vast and almost inconceivable weight the glacier is compelled to move.  Imagine the millions of millions of tons of ice of these sloping masses, pressing down upon the hundreds of thousands of tons of ice that lie below.  Slowly the mass begins to move.  But all parts of it do not move with equal velocity.  The center travels quicker than the margins, and the velocity of the surface is greater than that of the bottom.  Naturally the velocity increases with the slope, and when the ice begins to soften in the summer time its rate of motion is increased.