April, 1919] Beginnings of Reve gelation 341 



FICKLE CREEK SHIFTS ITS COURSE ONE THOUSAND FEET 



IN A YEAR. 



Perhaps the most astonishing instance of the instabihty of 

 the country was encountered when we traveled up toward 

 Soluka Creek in 1916. Here, as elsewhere, the country looked 

 perfectly familiar, but when we tried to find our last year's 

 camp our memories seemed to fail us, for we could not locate 

 it. How we could have missed it was a mystery, for it was 

 conveniently located on the bank of a tumultuous torrent 

 which supplied us with water. Curious to check up our unusual 

 lapse of memory, we hunted and hunted through the dead 

 forest in search of the old camp. 



Finally we found the tent pins and the coals of the fire, 

 just as we had left them, but the creek was nowhere in the 

 vicinity. It had moved a thousand feet away. 



Not only was the stream gone, its very bed was missing as 

 well. The year before it had flowed in a steep sided trench, 

 six feet below the general level, but now the ground was all 

 smoothed off so perfectly that we could not detect the position 

 of the former bank after the most careful search. 



That some plants can start in such places, when the surface 

 remains undisturbed, was shown by an examination of the 

 area beyond the migrations of the stream. In 1915 this was 

 absolutely sterile, but the next year we found in a space of 

 about ten acres one seedling of Carex, two of Calamagrostis 

 langsdorjii, two of another grass, a solitary specimen of 

 Chamaenerium an gusti folium and one patch of moss. Such 

 feeble beginnings of plant life may strike the reader, familiar 

 only with regions of luxuriant vegetation, as altogether too 

 insignificant to deserve notice. But such is not the case, for 

 these scattered plants, few and humble as they were, dem- 

 onstrated the possibility of new plants starting in deep and 

 pure ash deposits. Whether they were able to survive or 

 not is questionable, but even if they succumbed they attained 

 a size and weight far in excess of the seeds from which they 

 originated, and their decaying bodies will furnish material 

 for other plants to carry along the revegetation — that is, if 

 the stream does not shift and wash them out. 



