ae 
«that to get along was 
Description of a Slide on Mount Lafayette, N. H. 73 
Arr. XIII.—Description of a Slide on Mount Lafayette, at Fran- 
conia, New Hampshire ; by President Enwarp Hirencoox. 
Iy August, 1851, in company with S. C. Carter, Esq., of Am- 
herst, Mass., and Mr. Daniel Bliss, of the senior class in Amherst 
College, I visited the White Mountains of New Hampshire. We 
first went to Franconia Notch, and from thence we ascended La 
Fayette Mountain, which, without attempting great accuracy, 
I made, by the aneroid and syphon barometers, 5,164 feet above 
the ocean. It can be ascended only by a very wretched foot- 
path, among vast quantities of detritus, with most of the sur- 
face covered with low evergreens, whose thick-set branches 
Make it almost impossible to force our way through them, if not 
previously cut out. The ascent is about three miles, and the 
view from the summit as grand, for aught I could see, as that 
from Mount Washington, which is about 2,000 feet higher. 
In our descent from the mountain, I noticed a hundred rods 
to the tight of the path, and perhaps a thousand feet below the 
Summit, the commencement of a slide; and the large amount 
of rock laid bare at its upper end, incited a desire to visit the 
hear to the path by which we ascended, and still farther down, we 
thought it could not be very distant from the Notch House Hotel, 
om Whence we started. With great difficulty we clambered over 
the angular blocks, and through the tangled bushes, to the head 
of the slide. Having taken courses a little diverse, we lost sight of 
one another; and it was with great difficulty that we at length 
formed a reunion again, at the head of the slide, There we saw a 
mass of naked gneiss rock, many rods wide, mostly denuded of 
soil, and much of it also of several layers of the rock, which had 
slid downwards, and were strewn along the sides of the ravine, 
for at least two miles. This naked surface, at its upper part, had 
a slope of about 38°. Lower down, however, it was much less, 
for the most part, and at ‘its termination the descent was slight. 
A brook commenced quite as high I think as the slide, and this 
creased rapidly as we descended, until it became a streamlet of 
Considerable size within five or six miles. anh os 
_ Batt Will first describe some of the unexpected perils we met 
mM our descent, as a caution to those who traverse mountain- 
ous Tegions covered with unbroken forests. At first the rock in 
se 
Piled up in tid so tangled the brush a little beyond 
Oe sone, Fe as hazardous and difficult. We 
No, 40.—July 1852. 10 
Scoxp Senims, Vol, XI 
