IN TOUCH WITH NATURE

Hokitika Guardian, 7 December 1922, Page 4

IN TOUCH WITH NATURE

(By J. Drummond, F.L.S., F.Z.S., written for the “Lyttelton Times.”

The Main Smith Westland Hoad,] after crossing the Hokitika Diver runs j up hill and down dale inland, dissecting forests, swamps and river hods. j In the old gold rush days, there was j no road, and the gold-seekers, with ■ swags on their hacks, kept mostly to | the sea honchos, leaving them only , when compelled to do so. South ol the M.ikonui Diver, and north of the Waitaha, they walked along three miles of sand, and looked up at a majestic cliff, some 400 ft high, which presents almost all the way a vertical face to the waves. It is an eloquent testimony to the victory of the sea over the land, and ol the stupendous power of glaciers. Huge boulders beyond low-water mark are evidence of the bluff’s former dimensions. It went far out to sea. It is formed of debris carried by old-time glaciers. It is, in fact, the end moraine of a great glacier that came down from the Alps through the Waitaha Valley into the sea. Docks and boulders that bespat- j ter its face like pimples were taken from the central alpine chain, many miles away’*, some, actually* from the •summits, are identical with rocks that compose moraines of large extinct glaciers on the eastern side of the chain. A remarkable erratic boulder, about 40ft high and perhaps 30ft in diameter crowned with flax and shrubs, and composed of folded clay slates, with quartz layers between-the folds, standing in front of the centre of the cliff, a few chains in advance of it, would cause miners to pause in their journeys. It was torn by a glacier from its original home in the mountains and stranded at Bold Head when the ice retreated. It has been compared to a better known erratic about the same size, and with a similar history, the Pierre a lint., which rests on the side of a hill of the Jura Mountains, Switzerland, 800 ft above Lake Xeuoliatcl. Sir Julius von Haast, who

tramped the beach with his assistants, two Maoris and a European. tifty- I seven years ago, passed the cliff “with | wonder and delight” at the ease with i which a moraine accumulation could , he studied there. Moraines at Lake ! Kanieri and Lake lan the. at Hold . Head, and at scores of other places south of Hokitika, testify to the extent and power of glaciers that ran down from the Alps in remote geological times. According to geological , opinion, the process of glaciation be- ] gan in the Miocene Period, and the glaciers advanced in the Fppvr Pliocene or. later, in the Pleistocene Period. They retreated very slowly, making minor advances before finally leaving the low lands, and heaping-up in their old channels debris that Ivul fallen upon them in the alpine chain. Amongst the debris were block- of enormous size now embedded in soil. <