This weekend, I visited Rocky Mountain National Park in Estes Park, CO. I spent the night at Moraine Park Campground. Moraine Park is a large U-shaped valley formed by a valley glacier during the Great Ice Age about 2.5 million years ago. The sides of this mass valley include giant boulders deposited by the glacier forming lateral moraines. Along the flat ground many other boulders remain as ground moraine, while at the end lies a large terminal moraine. The large open valley of Moraine Park was this ancient glacier’s zone of wastage. Here, the ice would begin to melt, depositing a lot of debris. The lateral moraines consist of straited, polished rock, rather than the brittle crummy rock untouched by glacial erosion in other parts of the national park. From the mass valley, I hiked the Cub Lake Trail to Cub Lake which contains an abundance of till and seems to be in a cirque-like gorge formed by the glacier. Please see the attached birds-eye pictures of the area. You can see the way that this large mass of ice formed the U-shaped valley, leaving behind lateral moraines, medial moraines, ground moraine, and end moraines as well as a large open valley where the snout of the glacier resided and the ice finally melted.
Moraine Park - U-shaped valley formed by glacial erosion
Till at Cub Lake
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