The Spell of the Rockies

by Enos A. Mills

Now the rain almost ceased, and I began to descend. The upper gentle slopes were completely covered with a filmy sheet of clear water which separated into tattered torrents and took on color. These united and grew in size as they progressed from the top, and each was separated from its companions by ridges that widened and gulches that deepened as down the sides they went. The waters carried most of the eroded material away, but here and there, where they crossed a comparatively level stretch, small deposits of gravel were made or sandbars and deltas formed.

Occasionally I saw miniature landslides, and, hoping for a larger one to move, I hurried downward. Knowing that the soil is often deep at the foot of crags on account of contributions from above, together with the protection from erosion which the cliffs gave, I endeavored to find such a place. While searching, I had occasion to jump from a lower ledge on a cliff to the deposit below. The distance to the slope and its real pitch were minimized by the mists. After shooting through the air for at least thrice the supposed distance to the slope, I struck heavily and loosened several rods of a landslide. I tumbled off the back of it, but not before its rock points had made some impressions.

I sought safety and a place of lookout on a crag, and picked bits of granite gravel from my anatomy. Presently I heard a muffled creaking, and looked up to see a gigantic landslide starting. At first it moved slowly, seemed to hesitate, then slid faster, with its stone-filled front edge here and there doubling and rolling under; finally the entire mass broke into yawning, ragged fissures as it shot forward and plunged over a cliff. Waiting until most of the straggling, detached riffraff had followed, I hastened to examine the place just evacuated. In getting down I disturbed a ground-hog from his rock point, and found that he was in the same attitude and position I had seen him holding just before the slide started, so that the exhibition had merely caused him to move his eyes a little.

In the cracks and crevices of the glaciated rock-slope from which this mass had slid, there were broken, half-decayed roots and numerous marks which showed where other roots had held. It seems probable that if the grove which sustained them had not been destroyed by fire, they in turn would have anchored and held securely the portion of land which had just slipped away.

I went over the lower slopes of the burned area and had a look at numerous new-made gullies, and near the forks I measured a large one. It was more than a hundred feet long, two to four feet wide, and, over the greater part of its length, more than four feet deep. It was eroded by the late downpour, and its misplaced material, after being deposited by the waters, would of itself almost call for an increase of the river and harbor appropriations.

Late in the afternoon, with the storm breaking, I stopped and watched the largest torrent from the devastated region pour over a cliff. This waterfall more nearly represented a liquefied landslide, for it was burdened with sediment and spoils. As it rushed wildly over, it carried enormous quantities of dirt, gravel, and other earthy wreckage, and some of the stones were as large as a man's hat. Now and then there was a slackening, but these momentary subsidences were followed by explosive outpourings with which mingled large pieces of charred or half-decayed wood, sometimes closely pursued by a small boulder or some rock-fragments. Surely, these deforested slopes were heavy contributors to the millions of tons of undesirable matter that annually went in to fill the channel and vex the current of the Mississippi!

These demonstrations brought to mind a remark of an army engineer to the effect that the "Western forest fires had resulted in filling the Missouri River channel full of dissolved Rocky Mountains." The action of the water on this single burned area suggested that ten thousand other fireswept heights must be rapidly diminishing. At all events, it is evident that, unless this erosion is stopped, boats before long will hardly find room to enter the Mississippi. It now became easier to account for the mud-filled channel of the great river, and also for the innumerable bars that display their broad backs above its shallow, sluggish water. Every smooth or fluted fill in this great stream tells of a ragged gulch or a roughened, soilless place somewhere on a slope at one of its sources.

What a mingling of matter makes up the mud of the Mississippi,—a soil mixture from twenty States, the blended richness of ten thousand slopes! Coming up the "Father of Waters," and noting its obstructions of sediment and sand, its embarrassment of misplaced material, its dumps and deposits of soil,—monumental ruins of wasted resources,—one may say, "Here lies the lineal descendant of Pike's Peak; here the greater part of an Ohio hill"; or, "A flood took this from a terraced cotton-field, and this from a farm in sunny Tennessee." A mud flat itself might remark, "The thoughtless lumberman who caused my downfall is now in Congress urging river improvement"; and the shallow waters at the big bend could add, "Our once deep channel was filled with soil from a fire-scourged mountain. The minister whose vacation fire caused this ruin is now a militant missionary among the heathen of Cherry Blossom land."

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