The Explorer King by Robert Wilson

Author:Robert Wilson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2006-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

As they moved the chains across the northern border of what would become the new park, resorting to triangulation in spots where the chains could not easily go, King only occasionally slipped away to peer over the precipices—Three Brothers, Yosemite Falls, and Yosemite Point, North Dome and the Royal Arches. He traced Yosemite Creek, mostly dry in this dry season, the twelve miles up to Mount Hoffmann, which King climbed. Wherever he looked King found evidence of glacial activity, which we now know is what created Yosemite Valley in its present form. King’s boss, Josiah Whitney, accepted the partial role of glaciers, as evidenced by the lesser valleys they plowed into the main valley, the markings they left on the granite, and several moraines that King identified. But Whitney, who was a doctrinaire catastrophist, believed that the Yosemite Valley itself was caused by a series of faster, more dramatic events, in which the floor of the valley actually dropped out, creating the sheer cliffs everywhere in evidence. The reasons for his theory were not only the height and verticality of the walls but the relative absence of glacial debris along the valley floor. Whitney did report in Geology King’s belief that glaciers converged in the valley into one glacier a thousand feet thick. But since many of the vertical walls are as high as three thousand feet, this tended to reinforce Whitney’s theory in his own mind. Whitney believed that the glaciers came on after the dropping out of the valley bottom, which would have happened as the mountains themselves were being thrust up. But he rightly concluded in Geology that “the time which has elapsed since the Yosemite was inhabited by a glacier cannot have been very long.” John Muir would discover an active glacier there in 1871.

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