Sometimes there is not a
single foam-bell, or drifting pine-needle, or irregularity of any sort
to manifest its motion. Yet when observed narrowly it is seen to form a
web of gliding lacework exquisitely woven, giving beautiful reflections
from its minute curving ripples and eddies, and differing from the
water-laces of large cascades in being everywhere transparent. In
spring, when the snow is melting, the lake-bowl is brimming full, and
sends forth quite a large stream that slips glassily for 200 yards or
so, until it comes to an almost vertical precipice 800 feet high, down
which it plunges in a fine cataract; then it gathers its scattered
waters and goes smoothly over folds of gently dipping granite to its
confluence with the main canon stream. During the greater portion of the
year, however, not a single water sound will you hear either at head or
foot of the lake, not oven the whispered lappings of ripple-waves along
the shore; for the winds are fenced out. But the deep mountain silence
is sweetened now and then by birds that stop here to rest and drink on
their way across the canon.
LAKE STAKE KING
A beautiful variety of the bench-top lakes occurs just where the great
lateral moraines of the main glaciers have been shoved forward in
outswelling concentric rings by small residual tributary glaciers.
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