The dam of Red Lake is an elegantly modeled rib of metamorphic slate, brought into relief because of its superior strength, and because of the greater intensity of the glacial erosion of the rock immediately above it, caused by a steeply inclined tributary glacier, which entered the main trunk with a heavy down-thrust at the head of the lake.
Moraine Lake furnishes an equally interesting example of a basin formed wholly, or in part, by a terminal moraine dam curved across the path of a stream between two lateral moraines.
At Moraine Lake the canon proper terminates, although apparently continued by the two lateral moraines of the vanished glacier.

These moraines are about 300 feet high, and extend unbrokenly from the sides of the canon into the plain, a distance of about five miles, curving and tapering in beautiful lines.

Their sunward sides are gardens, their shady sides are groves; the former devoted chiefly to eriogonae, compositae, and graminae; a square rod containing five or six profusely flowered eriogonums of several species, about the same number of bahia and linosyris, and a few grass tufts; each species being planted trimly apart, with bare gravel between, as if cultivated artificially.
My first visit to Bloody Canon was made in the summer of 1869, under circumstances well calculated to heighten the impressions that are the peculiar offspring of mountains.

I came from the blooming tangles of Florida, and waded out into the plant-gold of the great valley of California, when its flora was as yet untrodden.

Never before had I beheld congregations of social flowers half so extensive or half so glorious.