Made by Glacier & Beaver

Click on the image above to see a larger version.

Moxham Mountain -- from where this was shot -- is one of many in the Adirondacks with steep, rocky south slopes and cliffs.  They were made by the advancing glaciers shearing off rocks from the "leeward" slopes of mountains and carrying them to the south over 20,000 years ago.  As the glaciers (more than a mile thick) retreated, they created lakes and ponds several ways.  The two high ponds here look like kettle ponds, which were made by huge blocks of ice that were surrounded by glacial debris.  In recent times, beaver are the new shapers of the landscape.  Below the kettle ponds, treeless areas appear as beaver dams flood large areas and then slowly fill in.
 

I shot this quickly along the trail as I was trying to get to the summit before sunset.  If I go by here again, I'll try more compositions using the sunlit foreground grasses.

Canon 5D3; Canon 24-105 mm.
1/80 sec. @ f/8; ISO 320
This is about half of a 4-frame pano stitched in PS CC.

This altered version of the image will appear only on NPN.  I cloned out two inconspicuous distant cleared fields in order to comply with the NPN Landscape Gallery rule requiring "no evidence of hand-of-man."  I did that because I don't believe a photograph of a wild landscape that includes a practically invisible clearing miles away in the corner of the frame belongs in the Man and Nature Gallery.