// alpine geomorphology & exposure bureau

Read the
Strike

Liltcrag does not build. We expose. The glacier retreated and left the rock talking — striae pointing where the ice went, joint sets counting the cooling, a gneiss band recording a mountain that no longer stands. The work is not made; it is already there, planed by ice. We only hold the clinometer.

Climb to the Outcrop
— glacial striae · azimuth 214° —
lithostratigraphic units logged
Bedded Units
Unit 1 · paragneiss

Striae Memory

The last ice sheet leaned on this face and scratched it. Each groove is a compass reading frozen in quartz: azimuth 214°, dip shallow, load winter-true. Scrape your palm along them and you feel which way the valley used to flow. The rock is a tape recorder with a diamond stylus.

azimuth 214°quartz
Unit 2 · jointed granite

Joint Set Logic

Cooling makes rectangles. Two orthogonal sets, one diagonal, and suddenly the massif is pre-cut into blocks that gravity only later agrees to move. We map the cuts, not the fall. A landslide is just a joint set that finally got tired of waiting for a trigger.

J1 080°J2 150°
Unit 3 · till veneer

Aeolian Resort

Above the striae sits a skin of unsorted till, and above that, on windy days, a drift of loess-sized grit that travels further than any glacier. The summit is not quiet: it is a sorting table where the wind keeps promoting the fine and demoting the coarse.

loessd10 0.02mm
— bedding dip 12°SE —
measured section totals
Lithology Readout
2480m
Datum Elev.
12°
Bedding Dip
3sets
Joint Systems
Stripes Planed
— bench mark · brass 17B —
fixed datum plate
Bench Mark

Outcrop Datum

Locality
Obere Straße 18
3818 Grindelwald, CH
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