1094 



AMERICAN FORESTRY 



ciated with human activities and to picture what would side. The gashes made by the two united below the slate 

 have been the result had a thriving mining town been in quarry and left the enormous mass of mountain isolated 

 the pathway of even the small Cimmaron landslip, one and unsupported. Then four minutes later those who 



were watching the phenomenon from a 

 distance beheld the whole upper portion 

 of the Plattenbergkopf 12,000,000 cubic 

 yards of rock- suddenly shoot down the 

 hillside. The great mass pitched for- 

 ward with tremendous velocity until it 

 reached the slate quarry. Then the upper 

 part shot forward horizontally straight 

 across the valley and up the opposite hill- 

 slope. A great wind was flung before 

 it, which blew trees about like matches 

 and lifted houses through the air like 

 feathers. The avalanche, shooting with 

 incredible swiftness across the valley, 

 struck the opposite hillslopes obliquely 

 and was immediately deflected like water 

 down the level but fertile valley floor, 

 which it covered in a few seconds to the 

 distance of nearly a mile and over its 

 whole width a million square yards 

 with a mass of rock debris from ten to 

 sixty feet deep. Before the avalanche 

 there lay a peaceful village and fertile 



Photo by ll'hitmatt Cross, U. S. C. S. 

 LIZARD'S UKAD 



Once upon a time this lofty pinnacle in Colorado, 

 14,000 feet high, bore no resemblance to a lizard's 

 head. That was before the major portion of thi' 

 peak broke away from its moorings and crashed 

 down the moimtainside, a rock avalanche constitu- 

 ting millions of tons of stone. 



must turn to the account of the great 

 Elm landslide in Switzerland in 1881 or 

 the Frank slide in Alberta in 1903. 



The town of Elm is the highest village 

 in the Sernf Meadow. Overshadowing 

 it rose the steep l'lattenl)ergkopf, the 

 outmost buttress of a greater jnountain 

 mass. About half way up this hill was a 

 slate mine. .\ creek began to form aliove 

 the mine, which became twelve feet 

 wide, swallowing u]) all surface drain- 

 age. It was believed that the mountain 

 would ultimately till, hut no one thought 

 the danger imminent. Rocks began to 

 fall at intervals. September 1 1 was a 

 rainy Sunday. Kock masses kc])t falling 

 and the mountain groaned and rumbled. 

 People gathered to fatch the falls, inter- 

 ested but not alarmed. Yet the villagers 

 might better have lingered to witness n 

 hundred-ton dynamite explosion. Sud- 

 denly a mass of the mountain broke away 

 from the east side of the I'lattcnbcrg 

 kopf, crashed down over the slate (|uarry and spread 

 away over the flat. No one was killed by this fall, though 

 the rocks reached within a stone's throw of where the 

 sightseers were gathered. The people of the upper 

 village now took mild alarm. A few minutes after a 

 second and larger rock mass tumbled down over the west 



FACE OF LANDSLIDE MOUNTAIN 



The slopes of many mountains in the landslide area of Colorado have been scalped bare of 

 every vestige of vegetation. With tens of thousands of tons of rock descending like a 

 flash, the most heavily wooded mountain sides are swept like grass before a prairie tire. 



grain fields; within twenty seconds a solid gray carpet 

 had been spread, beneath which rested the remains of 

 150 human beings, their houses and their fields. The 

 rock torrent had swept away half the village, its sharj) 

 edge cutting one house in two. All within the fatal edge 

 were destroyd ; all without were saved. 



