is a look to the west from the location of the postulated moraine. The newspaper article's interviewees are asking us to imagine hundreds of feet of ice lying in this valley all the way to the tops of the mountains in the background. My alternative view is that there were indeed glaciers, ones that terminated somewhat below where the present, small snowfields still exist that are visible in this photo. During that period, he said, the climate must have been much wetter than today. After all, it takes abundant snowfall that accumulates winter after winter, turning the bottom layers into a solid ice sheet that begins moving under the force of its own weight. The 4-plus inches of precipitation that typically fall on the Las Vegas Valley now wouldn't be enough to sustain a buildup of snow in the Spring Mountains. But back then, snowpacks lasted long enough to create a glacier. Caught in this glacier were pieces of bedrock that became rounded and polished by its moving ice and scratched by other rocks and gravel crashing into it. As the glacier melted and receded, rocks and sediment were left piled in its path. Besides the different terrain, animals now extinct roamed the landscape at lower elevations, including creatures such as ground sloths, mammoths, saber-toothed tigers, ancient camels and wolves. If the alpine glacier existed 20,000 years ago, from that point in time it would have been some 10,600 years until Nevada's oldest known human inhabitant, Spirit Cave Man, walked in what is now the state, based on the mummified remains of the man found in a cave east of Fallon in 1940.