Crossword-Solution: NEVE 4 letters, 128 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 7

And again, on the 17th of last August, while making the ascent of Mount Jefferson, the dominating mountain of the Toquima range, I discovered an exceedingly interesting group of moraines, cañons with V-shaped cross sections, wide neve amphitheatres, moutoneed rocks, glacier meadows, and one glacier lake, all as fresh and telling as if the glaciers to which they belonged had scarcely vanished.

Four other cañons, extending down the eastern slopes of this grand old mountain into Monito Valley, are hardly less rich in glacial records, while the effects of the mountain shadows in controlling and directing the movements of the residual glaciers to which all these phenomena belonged are everywhere delightfully apparent in the trends of the cañons and ridges, and in the massive sculpture of the neve wombs at their heads.

Our friend John Jones’s report of plains and bogs and a lake above makes it quite possible that in the “Ice age” (Glacial Epoch, as the big-word-mongers call it) there was above that cliff a great neve, or snowfield, such as you have seen often in the Alps at the head of each glacier.

Over the face of this cliff a glacier has crawled down from that neve, polishing the face of the rock in its descent: but the snow, having no large and deep outlet, has not slid down in a sufficient stream to reach the vale below, and form a glacier of the first order; and has therefore stopped short on the other side of the lake, as a glacier of the second order, which ends in an ice-cliff hanging high up on the mountain side, and kept from further progress by daily melting.

The stones which the glacier rubbed off the cliff beneath it it carried forward, slowly but surely, till they saw the light again in the face of the ice-cliff, and dropped out of it under the melting of the summer sun, to form a huge dam across the ravine; till, the “Ice age” past, a more genial climate succeeded, and neve and glacier melted away: but the “moraine” of stones did not, and remains to this day, as the dam which keeps up the waters of the lake.