Alone with a Landslide

Realizing the importance of traveling as lightly as possible during my hasty trip through the Uncompahgre Mountains, I allowed myself to believe that the golden days would continue. Accordingly I set off with no bedding, with but little food, and without even snowshoes. A few miles up the trail, above Lake City, I met a prospector coming down and out of these mountains for the winter. "Yes," he said, "the first snow usually is a heavy one, and I am going out now for fear of being snowed-in for the winter." My imagination at once pictured the grand mountains deeply, splendidly covered with snow, myself by a camp-fire in a solemn primeval forest without food or bedding, a camp-bird on a near-by limb sympathizing with me in low, confiding tones, the snow waist-deep and mountains-wide. Then I dismissed the imaginary picture of winter and joyfully climbed the grand old mountains amid the low and leafless aspens and the tall and richly robed firs.

I was impelled to try to make this mountain realm a National Forest and felt that sometime it would become a National Park. The wonderful reports of prospectors about the scenery of this region, together with what I knew of it from incomplete exploration, eloquently urged this course upon me. My plan was to make a series of photographs, from commanding heights and slopes, that would illustrate the forest wealth and the scenic grandeur of this wonderland. In the centre Uncompahgre Peak rose high, and by girdling it a little above the timber I obtained a number of the desired photographs, and then hurried from height to height, taking other pictures of towering summits or their slopes below that were black and purpling with impressive, pathless forests.

The second evening I went into camp among some picturesque trees upon a skyline at an altitude of eleven thousand feet above the tides. While gathering wood for a fire, I paused to watch the moon, a great globe of luminous gold, rise strangely, silently into the mellow haze of autumn night. For a moment on the horizon it paused to peep from behind a crag into a scattered group of weird storm-beaten trees on a ridge before me, then swiftly floated up into lonely, misty space. Just before I lay down for the night, I saw a cloud-form in the dim, low distance that was creeping up into my moonlit world of mountains. Other shadowy forms followed it. A little past midnight I was awakened by the rain falling gently, coldly upon my face. As I stood shivering with my back to the fire, there fell an occasional feathery flake of snow.

Had my snowshoes been with me, a different lot of experiences would have followed. With them I should have stayed in camp and watched the filmy flakes form their beautiful white feathery bog upon the earth, watched robes, rugs, and drapery decorate rocks and cliffs, or the fir trees come out in pointed, spearhead caps, or the festoons form upon the limbs of dead and lifeless trees,—crumbling tree-ruins in the midst of growing forest life. To be without food or snowshoes in faraway mountain snows is about as serious as to be adrift in a lifeboat without food or oars in the ocean's wide waste. In a few minutes the large, almost pelt-like flakes were falling thick and fast. Hastily I put the two kodaks and the treasured films into water-tight cases, pocketed my only food, a handful of raisins, adjusted hatchet and barometer, then started across the strange, snowy mountains through the night.

The nearest and apparently the speediest way out lay across the mountains to Ridgway; the first half of this fifteen miles was through a rough section that was new to me. After the lapse of several years this night expedition appears a serious one, though at the time it gave me no concern that I recall. How I ever managed to go through that black, storm-filled night without breaking my neck amid the innumerable opportunities for accident, is a thing that I cannot explain.

I descended a steep, rugged slope for a thousand feet or more with my eyes useless in the eager falling of mingled rain and snow. Nothing could be seen, but despite slow, careful going a dead limb occasionally prodded me. With the deliberation of a blind man I descended the long, steep, broken, slippery slope, into the bottom of a caÑon. Now and then I came out upon a jumping-off place; here I felt before and below with a slender staff for a place to descend; occasionally no bottom could be found, and upon this report I would climb back a short distance and search out a way.

Activity kept me warm, although the cold rain drenched me and the slipperiness of slopes and ledges never allowed me to forget the law of falling bodies. At last a roaring torrent told me that I was at the bottom of a slope. Apparently I had come down by the very place where the stream contracted and dashed into a deep, narrow box caÑon. Not being able to go down stream or make a crossing at this point, I turned and went up the stream for half a mile or so, where I crossed the swift, roaring water in inky darkness on a fallen Douglas spruce,—for such was the arrangement of its limbs and the feel of the wood in its barkless trunk, that these told me it was a spruce, though I could see nothing. During this night journey I put myself both in feeling and in fact in a blind man's place,—the best lesson I ever had to develop deliberation and keenness of touch.

The next hour after crossing the stream I spent in climbing and descending a low wooded ridge with smooth surface and gentle slopes. Then there was one more river, the Little Cimarron, to cross. An Engelmann spruce, with scaly, flaky bark, that had stood perfectly perpendicular for a century or two but had recently been hurled to the horizontal, provided a long, vibrating bridge for me to cross on. Once across, I started to climb the most unstable mountain that I had ever trodden.

Mt. Coxcomb, up which I climbed, is not one of the "eternal hills" but a crumbling, dissolving, tumbling, transient mountain. Every hard rain dissolves, erodes, and uncovers the sides of this mountain as if it were composed of sugar, paste, and stones. It is made up of a confused mingling of parts and masses of soluble and flinty materials. Here change and erosion run riot after every rain. There is a great falling to pieces; gravity, the insatiable, is temporarily satisfied, and the gulches feast on earthy materials, while the river-channel is glutted with crushed cliffs, acres of earth, and the dÉbris of ruined forests. Here and there these are flung together in fierce confusion.

On this bit of the wild world's stage are theatrical lightning changes of scenes,—changes that on most mountains would require ten thousand years or more. It is a place of strange and fleeting landscapes; the earth is ever changing like the sky. In wreathed clouds a great cliff is born, stands out bold and new in the sunshine and the blue. The Storm King comes, the thunders echo among crags and caÑons, the broken clouds clear away, and the beautiful bow bends above a ruined cliff.

Here and there strange, immature monsters are struggling to rise,—to free themselves from the earth. Occasionally a crag is brought forth full grown during one operation of gravity, erosion, and storm, and left upon a foundation that would raise corn but never sustain cliff or crag. Scattered monoliths at times indulge in a contest of leaning the farthest from the perpendicular without falling. The potato-patch foundations of these in time give way, then gravity drags them head foremost, or in broken installments, down the slope.

Among the forested slopes that I traversed there were rock-slides, earthy glaciers, and leafless gulches with crumbling walls. Some of these gulches extended from bottom to top of the mountain, while others were digging their way. An occasional one had a temporary ending against the bottom of a kingly cliff, whose short reign was about to end as its igneous throne was disorganized and decomposed. The storm and darkness continued as I climbed the mountain of short-lived scenes,—a mountain so eagerly moving from its place in the sky to a bed in the sea. The saturation had softened and lubricated the surface; these sedimentary slopes had been made restless by the rain.

I endeavored to follow up one of the ridges, but it was narrow and all the pulpy places very slippery. Fearing to tumble off into the dark unknown, I climbed down into a gully and up this made my way toward the top. All my mountain experience told me to stay on the ridge and not travel in darkness the way in which gravity flings all his spoils.

The clouds were low, and I climbed well up into them. The temperature was cooler, and snow was whitening the earth. When I was well up to the silver lining of the clouds, a gust of wind momentarily rent them, and I stood amid snow-covered statuary,—leaning monoliths and shattered minarets all weird and enchanting in the moonlight. A few seconds later I was in darkness and snowstorm again.

The gulch steepened and apparently grew shallower. Occasionally a mass of mud or a few small stones rolled from the sides of the gulch to my feet and told that saturation was at work dissolving and loosening anchorages and foundations. It was time to get out of the gulch. While I was making haste to do so, there came a sudden tremor instantly followed by an awful crash and roar. Then r-r-rip! z-zi-ip! s-w-w-r-r-ip! A bombardment of flying, bounding, plunging rocks from an overturned cliff above was raking my gulch. Nothing could be seen, but several slaps in the face from dashes of snow which these rock missiles disturbed and displaced was expressively comprehensive.

As this brief bombardment ceased, the ominous sounds from above echoing among the cliffs shouted warning of an advancing landslide. This gave a little zest to my efforts to get out of the gulch; too much perhaps, for my scramble ended in a slip and a tumble back to the bottom. In the second attempt a long, uncovered tree-root reached down to me in the darkness, and with the aid of this I climbed out of the way of the avalanche. None too soon, however. With quarreling and subdued grinding sounds the rushing flood of landslide material went past, followed by an offensive smell.

While I paused listening to the monster groan and grind his way downward, the cliffs fired a few more rock missiles in my direction. One struck a crag beside me. The explosive contact gave forth a blast of sputtering sparks and an offensive, rotten-egg smell. A flying fragment of this shattered missile struck my left instep, breaking one of the small bones.

Fortunately my foot was resting in the mud when struck. When consciousness came back to me I was lying in the mud and snow, drenched, mud-bespattered, and cold. The rain and snow had almost ceased to fall, and while I was bandaging my foot the pale light of day began to show feebly through heavy clouds. If that luminous place is in the eastern horizon, then I have lost my sense of direction. An appeal to the compass brought no consolation, for it said laconically, "Yes, you are turned around now, even though you never were before." The accuracy of the compass was at once doubted,—but its decree was followed.

Slowly, painfully, the slippery, snowy steeps were scaled beneath a low, gloomy sky. My plan was to cross the north shoulder of Mt. Coxcomb and then down slope and gulch descend to the deeply filled alluvium Uncompahgre valley and the railroad village of Ridgway. With the summit only a few feet above, the wall became so steep and the hold so insecure that it appeared best to turn back lest I be precipitated from the cliff. The small, hard points in the sedimentary wall had been loosened in their settings by the rain. Climbing this wall with two good feet in a dry time would be adventurous pastime. While I was flattened against the wall, descending with greatest caution, there came a roaring crash together with a trembling of earth and air. An enormous section of the opposite side of the mass that I was on had fallen away, and the oscillations of the cliff nearly hurled me to the rock wreckage at the bottom of the wall.

On safe footing at last, I followed along the bottom of the summit cliff and encountered the place from which the rocks had been hurled at me in the darkness and where a cliff had fallen to start the slide. It was evident that the storm waters had wrecked the foundation of the cliff. Ridges and gullies of the Bad Land's type fluted the slope and prevented my traveling along close to the summit at right angles to the slope. There appeared no course for me but to descend to the Little Cimarron River. Hours were required for less than two miles of painful though intensely interesting travel.

It was a day of landslides,—just as there are, in the heights, days of snow slides. This excessive saturation after months of drought left cohesion and adhesion but slight hold on these strange sedimentary mixtures. The surface tore loose and crawled; cliffs tumbled. After counting the crash and echoing roar of forty-three fallen cliffs, I ceased counting and gave more attention to other demonstrations.

On the steeps, numerous fleshy areas crawled, slipped, and crept. The front of a long one had brought up against a rock ledge while the blind rear of the mass pressed powerfully forward, crumpling, folding, and piling the front part against the ledge. At one place an enormous rocky buttress had tumbled over. Below, the largest piece of this, a wreck in a mass of mud, floated slowly down the slope in a shallow, moderately tilted gulch. This buttress had been something of an impounding, retaining wall against which loosened, down-drifting materials had accumulated into a terrace. The terrace had long been adorned with a cluster of tall spruces whose presence produced vegetable mould and improved soil conditions.

On the falling-away of this buttress the tree-plumed terrace commenced to sag and settle. The soil-covered dÉbris was well roped together and reinforced with tree-roots. When I came along, these tall trees, so long bravely erect, were leaning, drooping forward. Their entire foundation had slipped several feet and was steadily crowding out over the pit from which gravity had dragged the buttress. The trees, with their roots wedged in crevices, were anchored to bed-rock and clinging on for dear life. Now and then a low, thudding, earth-muffled sound told of strained or ruptured roots. The foundation steadily gave way while the trees drooped dangerously forward. United on the heights, the brave trees had struggled through the seasons, and united they would go down together. They had fixed and fertilized the spoil from the slopes above. This spoil had been held and made to produce, and prevented from going down to clog the channel of the Little Cimarron or making with the waters the long, sifting, shifting journey, joining at last the lifeless soil deposits in the delta tongues of the Colorado. But the steadfast trees, with all their power to check erosion and create soil, were to fall before the overwhelming elements.

Farther and farther the unsupported and water-lubricated foundation slipped; more and more the trees leaned and drooped forward; until gravity tore all loose and plunged the trees head foremost into the pit, crushing down upon tumbled tons of rocks, soil, matted mud, and roots,—all the wreckage of the time-formed, tree-crowned terrace.

The slide that narrowly missed me in the night was a monster one and grew in magnitude as it brutally rooted and gouged its way downward. After descending more than half a mile it struck an enormous dome rock, which stayed a small part of it, while the remainder, deflected, made an awesome plunge and engulfed a small, circular grove in an easily sloping grassy plot. Most of the towering spruces were thrown down and deeply buried beneath mud, smashed cliffs, and the mangled forms of trees from up the slope. A few trees on the margin of the grove were left standing, but they suffered from cruel bruises and badly torn bark.

On the farther side of the grove a number of the trees were bent forward but only partly buried; with heads and shoulders out, they were struggling to extricate themselves, and now and then one shook an arm free from the dÉbris. Over the place where a few hours before tall tree plumes had stood in the sky, a fierce confusion of slide wreckage settled and tumbled to pieces while the buried and half-buried trees whispered, murmured, and sighed as they struggled to rise.

Out with nature trees are supposed to stand in one place all their lives, but one of the most interesting movements of this elemental day was the transplanting, by gravity, of an entire clump of tall old firs. Water released these trees, and they appeared to enjoy being dragged by gravity to a new home and setting. I was resting my foot and watching a gigantic monolithic stone settle and come down gracefully, when a tree-clump on the skyline just beyond appeared to move forward several yards, then make a stop. While I was trying to decide whether they really had moved or not, they moved forward again with all their earthly claims, a few square rods of surface together with their foundations beneath. With all tops merrily erect they slid forward, swerving right and left along the line of least resistance, and finally came to rest in a small unclaimed flat in which no doubt they grew up with the country.

The many-sized slides of that weird day showed a change of position varying from a few feet to a mile. Several ploughed out into the Little Cimarron and piled its channel more than full of spoils from the slopes. Through this the river fought its way, and from it the waters flowed richly laden with earthy matter.

The great changes which took place on Mt. Coxcomb in a few hours were more marked and extensive than the alterations in most mountains since the Sphinx began to watch the shifting, changing sands by the Nile.

By mid-afternoon the air grew colder and the snow commenced to deepen upon the earth. Bedraggled and limping, I made slow progress down the slope. Just at twilight a mother bear and her two cubs met me. They probably were climbing up to winter-quarters. I stood still to let them pass. When a few yards distant the bear rose up and looked at me with a combination of curiosity, astonishment, and perhaps contempt. With Woof! Woof! more in a tone of disgust than of fear or anger, she rushed off, followed by the cubs, and the three disappeared in the darkening, snow-filling forest aisles.

The trees were snow-laden and dripping, but on and on I went. Years of training had given me great physical endurance, and this, along with a peculiar mental attitude that Nature had developed in me from being alone in her wild places at all seasons, gave me a rare trust in her and an enthusiastic though unconscious confidence in the ultimate success of whatever I attempted to accomplish out of doors.

About two o'clock in the morning I at last descended to the river. The fresh dÉbris on my side of the stream so hampered traveling that it became necessary to cross. Not finding any fallen-tree bridge, I started to wade across in a wide place that I supposed to be shallow. Midway and hip-deep in the swift water, I struck the injured foot against a boulder, momentarily flinching, and the current swirled me off my feet. After much struggling and battling with the turbulent waters, I succeeded in reaching the opposite shore. This immersion did not make me any wetter than I was or than I had been for hours, but the water chilled me; so I hurried forward as rapidly as possible to warm up.

After a few steps the injured leg suddenly became helpless, and I tumbled down in the snow. Unable to revive the leg promptly and being very cold from my icy-water experience, I endeavored to start a fire. Everything was soaked and snow-covered; the snow was falling and the trees dripping water; I groped about on my hands and one knee, dragging the paralyzed leg; all these disadvantages, along with chattering teeth and numb fingers, made my fire-starting attempts a series of failures.

That night of raw, primitive life is worse in retrospect than was the real one. Still I was deadly in earnest at the time. Twenty-four hours of alertness and activity in the wilds, swimming and wading a torrent of ice-water at two o'clock in the morning, tumbling out into the wet, snowy wilds miles from food and shelter, a crushed foot and a helpless leg, the penetrating, clinging cold, and no fire, is going back to nature about ten thousand years farther than it is desirable to go. But I was not discouraged even for a moment, and it did not occur to me to complain, though, as I look back now, the theory of non-resistance appears to have been carried a trifle too far. At last the fire blazed. After two hours beside it I went down the river greatly improved. The snow was about fifteen inches deep.

Shortly before daylight I felt that I was close to a trail I had traveled, one that came to Cimarron near by Court-House Rock. Recrossing the river on a fallen log, I lay down to sleep beneath a shelving rock with a roaring fire before me, sleeping soundly and deeply until the crash of an overturned cliff awakened me. Jumping to my feet, I found the storm over with the clouds broken and drifting back and forth in two strata as though undecided whether to go or remain. Above a low, lazy cloud, I caught a glimpse of Turret-Top, and turning, beheld Court-House Rock.

The foot gave no pain as I limped along the trail I had so often followed. Now and then I turned to take a photograph. The stars and the lights in the village were just appearing when I limped into the surgeon's office in Ridgway.