Cirques and rock-cut terraces of Mount Toby
Introduction Mount Toby, in Sunderland, 8 miles north of Amherst, is the highest elevation in the Triassic area in Massachusetts. It presents two unique topographic features—one a group of radiating cirques which show many of the characteristics of glacial cirques, but which may seem to be on too small a scale to have this origin, and the other a series of rock-cut terraces with vertical walls 10 to 150 feet high, which are confined to the west side of the mountain. The Cirques I owe the bird’s-eye view of the mountain (plate 30, figure 1), which shows the condition of things with great clearness, to the skill of my daughter, Mrs. Charlotte E. Hitchcock. There is some necessary exaggeration and some intentional disregard of the ordinary laws of shading in order to bring out all the steep-walled radiating depressions. The cirques do not appear so clearly as they should on . . .