Chapter IV: Part I: Experiences in Glacières (4)

I visited the Snow Hole with my brother on Friday, September the 29th, 1899. It is surrounded by a dense forest, mainly of recent growth, which thoroughly shelters it from all winds. In shape and appearance it resembles the Gorge at Ellenville, except that it is smaller: its location on the ridge is not unlike that of the Friedrichsteiner Eishöhle. It is a narrow crack--or cave minus a roof--about fifteen meters long, six to seven meters deep and from two to five meters wide. It faces nearly north, and the bottom is in perpetual shadow. From the northern end, a gentle slope leads to the rear. The slope was a good deal blocked up by a big tree with large branches, which had fallen directly into the fissure. There was some moss or greenish mould on the rocks in places, and at the rear end of the slope there were some fissures in the rocks, into which one might perhaps have crawled a little farther, which formed a tiny cave. There was also a similar incipient cave at the northern end. I could not detect any draughts issuing from these rock fissures, and the air throughout was still, although the wind was blowing hard on the ridge. The rocks were moist in places and the air damp, but there was neither snow nor ice and the temperatures were normal. The driver told me that he had found plenty of snow in the base of the gorge some years ago in July; and he said that he had always heard that snow was found in the Snow Hole all the year round. All the conditions of the place, the shape of the fissure, and its sheltered northern exposition, are favorable to the retention of ice and snow, and it is not surprising that they remain over every spring.

ICY GULF NEAR GREAT BARRINGTON.

The Icy Gulf or Icy Glen is some eight kilometers from Great Barrington, Massachusetts. I have not been in it, but was told in October, 1899, by the farmers living near by, that after snowy winters, ice remains over through July. It must be similar to the Icy Glen at Stockbridge.

THE ICE BED OF WALLINGFORD.

The Ice Bed of Wallingford is situated about three kilometers to the east of Wallingford, Vermont. A drive of half an hour, over the Mount Holly and Hearburrow roads, takes the visitor to the entrance of a rough wood path, which, at a distance of three or four hundred meters, leads to the Ice Bed. This is a huge talus, at the base of the White Rock Mountain, whose cliffs rise steeply overhead for some three or four hundred meters. The talus, which was doubtless formed by a great slide at some distant date, consists of granite boulders, some of which are big ones. The ice-bearing portion may be some thirty or forty meters high vertically. It lies in a sort of gully or rock basin, and at the top is about thirty meters broad, tapering to a point at the bottom. The talus faces southward, and during a good part of the day the sun shines full upon it. A thin forest fringes the sides and grows round the bottom, but this can afford but little protection from the winds, especially to those from the south.

I visited this place on the 5th of October, 1899. There was a distinct drop in temperature as we neared the base of the talus, and a cool air drew gently down over the rocks. I think slight draughts issued from some of the crevices; but of this I am not sure. The temperature was sub-normal, about 8°, but hardly low enough to prove the presence of ice, although we could see our breaths distinctly. We looked carefully under a number of the boulders, but neither ice nor snow was visible. I was assured that ice was abundant there in the past July and August, and I should think it had melted away only shortly before my visit. My impression is, that this is a periodic glacière.

CAVES NEAR WILLIAMSTOWN.

On the eastern slope of the Petersburgh Mountain of the Taghconic Range in Massachusetts, at a good deal lower altitude than the Williamstown Snow Hole and about southeast of it are some caverns, which are but little known. A five or six kilometer drive from Williamstown takes the visitor to the base of the mountain, whence a rather steep ascent of about a kilometer and a half brings him to the caves, which are in the midst of a dense, scrub forest.

The caves were first entered, and possibly discovered, by Mr. W. F. Williams, of Williamstown, when a boy. Since then, he has visited them many times and explored them a good deal. They do not appear to have any name as yet, and it would seem only fitting to christen them after their explorer: the Williams Caves.

There are several unimportant holes in the immediate neighborhood of the two main caves. The latter lie side by side. The rock formation is the same as that of the Snow Hole, a dark gray slate with a few veins of quartz, and they are due also evidently to the same geological causes. It would seem as though the mountain had tended to open or crack at these spots and fallen apart. This seems probable, because wherever there is a projection on one side of the cracks, there is a corresponding hollow in the opposite side. After this, water action has come, and erosion and corrosion have worn out and carried away earthy matter, and slowly deepened and widened the fissures. The remarkable point in connection with the main caves, however, is that one is a normal cave and the other a periodic glacière.

I went with Mr. Williams to these caves on the 6th of October, 1899, and partially explored the glacière. On the way up, just as we left the carriage road, a fine, three-year-old buck, in his winter coat, came bounding out of the forest; on seeing us he stopped, and after taking a good look, quietly trotted off into the bushes.

The glacière is rather peculiar in shape and may be described as two storied. A long slope, set at an angle of some forty degrees, and covered with mud and dead leaves, leads down into the crack, which is from one to three meters in width. The first half of the slope is open to the sky; the last half is covered by the rock roof, and is a real cave. In this the floor is horizontal, the place forming a little chamber in which the daylight has almost vanished. At the exact summit of the slope a big tree grew most conveniently; and we tied to this one end of a twenty-meter Austrian Alpine Club rope, and by holding fast to it, and kneeling or sitting down in the mud in two or three places, the descent was easy enough. It was rather difficult to scramble up the slope again, however.

In the floor of the little chamber there are two holes, and, stepping over these, we stood at the rear end, about eighteen meters distant from the beginning of the slope. My companion now set some birchbark on fire and dropped it into the innermost hole, and we laid down in turn, flat on the rock floor, and craned our necks through the hole. Mr. Williams thought he could see ice below us. I looked down after him and found that I was looking into a lower chamber whose sides were invisible. The floor was some three meters below vertically, and on this the birchbark was burning brightly. I think I saw some ice, but I could not be sure, as there was too much smoke to see distinctly. My companion offered to go down through the hole and get some ice; a proposition I promptly vetoed, as had anything gone wrong, I could not possibly have given him any assistance, as there was no extra rope. Mr. Williams told me that he went down several times before in July or August, and always found ice on the slanting floor. He said he did not know how far this lower chamber extended, nor the length of the ice floor. One thing which makes me hesitate to think that we saw ice was, that the temperature of the chamber where we were was not at all icy; but probably--I had forgotten my thermometer--nearly normal.

When we stood once more by the tree at the top of the slope, the mouth of another cave was visible about two meters below us. Mr. Williams said it had never looked more than a little crack before, and that the opening was much bigger than at his last visit. It was directly under the slope by which we descended and it vanished into darkness. Its direction led straight towards the lower chamber, and it almost surely leads to it. It seems thus that there are two hollows, one directly above the other; and that the lower one is a glacière, while the upper one is not. The cold air of winter would naturally sink into the lower chamber, and the spring thaws would furnish plenty of drip, so that this place seems to answer every requirement of a cave glacière.

But the most interesting fact about these caves is that, while the shallower one is a glacière, the bigger and deeper one is not. This is situated about ten meters north of the glacière and the direction of the entrance is about the same. Mr. Williams has found snow and ice in May in the entrance pit as far as the daylight goes, but none beyond. I am inclined to think that the explanation of this is the fact that the cave is a _ganghöhle_ or tunnel cave. Mr. Williams described it as a narrow passage with chambers, and at least a hundred meters long, and fifty meters in depth below the surface. The cold air sinks in a certain distance, but as the passage is narrow and long, and too winding for any strong draughts, the cold air which enters is soon neutralized by the supply of warmer air within and by contact with the rocks. I cannot help thinking that it is by some such explanation that we must hope to solve the problem of why certain caves are glacières and others in the immediate neighborhood normal caves; and the caves near Williamstown are exceptional in presenting the problem so patently.