COASTING 7 



A short distance from my timberline camp the 

 next morning I came to the largest icicle I have 

 ever seen. It overhung a cliff and must have 

 been two hundred feet high. At the top it was 

 twenty feet or more in diameter. The lower 

 end stood on an icy foundation that overspread 

 the rocks. While I was looking at a number of 

 smaller icicles one broke away and fell with a 

 crash. Chunks of this icicle as big as a huge 

 barrel went rolling and bounding down the 

 mountain side, one piece remaining unbroken 

 until it crushed into the tree tops at timberline. 



Snow covers small streams and protects them 

 from freezing, preventing ice forming and fill- 

 ing in their channels. But during a winter of 

 but little snow on mountain tops many a spring 

 overflows its ice-filled channel. Climbing to 

 the top of the cliff to which these icicles hung, I 

 found a great fanlike span of ice over the surface. 

 This was about three hundred feet wide at the 

 face of the cliff. There was a spring at the point 

 of the " V" or fan, some five hundred feet up the 

 slope. Without snow to protect this spring water, 

 it had frozen until the channel was filled with 

 ice. Then the water had overflowed, spreading 

 and freezing wider and deeper. This fanlike 

 span of ice had taken about three months to 

 form and in places was several feet deep. Over 

 the face of the cliff were icicles of all sizes, many 



