Orange Lake is a fair illustration of this bench form. It lies in the
middle of a beautiful glacial pavement near the lower margin of the
lake-line, about a mile and a half to the northwest of Shadow Lake. It
is only about 100 yards in circumference. Next the water there is a
girdle of carices with wide overarching leaves, then in regular order a
shaggy ruff of huckleberry bushes, a zone of willows with here and there
a bush of the Mountain Ash, then a zone of aspens with a few pines
around the outside. These zones are of course concentric, and together
form a wall beyond which the naked ice-burnished granite stretches away
in every direction, leaving it conspicuously relieved, like a bunch of
palms in a desert.
In autumn, when the colors are ripe, the whole circular grove, at a
little distance, looks like a big handful of flowers set in a cup to be
kept fresh--a tuft of goldenrods. Its feeding-streams are exceedingly
beautiful, notwithstanding their inconstancy and extreme shallowness.
They have no channel whatever, and consequently are left free to spread
in thin sheets upon the shining granite and wander at will. In many
places the current is less than a fourth of an inch deep, and flows with
so little friction it is scarcely visible.
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