282 CAMP-FIRES IN THE CANADIAN ROCKIES 



with fresh slide-rock the size of paving stones. As usual, 

 the slide-rock surface is immaculately clean, gray, sharp- 

 edged, and cruel to man and beast. 



About two miles farther down there is another mani- 

 festation of a very different character, and as a revelation 

 of power, it is enough to send a thrill of awe through a 

 pack-horse. I watched its effect on Kaiser, and am sure 

 he was deeply impressed by the sight. He sat near 

 me on a high log, and looked over the wreck until called 

 away. 



About ten years ago, an avalanche came down a long 

 and very steep mountain-side, through a thick patch of 

 green timber. Tall spruce trees, two feet in diameter and 

 seventy-five feet high, were swept down bodily, root, stem 

 and branch, as if they had been so many stalks of green 

 corn. The mass of snow and ice which did this, for in 

 it there was but little rock, must have been twenty or thirty 

 feet thick when it struck the heaviest of the green timber, 

 and solid as ice. As it went along, it tore up every tree, 

 sapling and bush, leaving in its path not one stick of wood 

 the size of a chair-post, and smashed the whole mass into 

 the bottom of the valley. You can find it there now, piled 

 twenty feet high above the bed of the creek, as shown in 

 Mr. Phillips's excellent photograph. 



Trees eighteen inches in diameter were snapped in 

 two; and one, with a stem as big as a large telegraph 

 pole, was bent like a bow. It is partly in view in the 

 left of the picture. The bark has weathered away from 

 all these logs, and the tangled mass of smooth gray trunks 

 now tells the story of the avalanche, just as the white 



