“Terrific? I assure you that word is not half strong enough to express it. When you go up to Cunningham gulch, and over into the other valleys, you will see the sides of the mountains, in certain places, utterly bare of trees two or three thousand feet below the limit of their growth. That is where they have been swept away and kept down by constantly recurring avalanches of snow, which in many parts of these ranges are liable to slip down in masses perhaps a mile square and anywhere from ten to a hundred feet deep, bringing rocks and everything else with them. Of course, no sapling could stand such a scraping,—nothing can. I was in a slide once, and I can appreciate it, I assure you.”
“You were!” exclaims the Madame, round-eyed at this. “I thought you said nothing could stand a snow-slide.”
“I didn’t attempt to. I went with it, and was carried down the mountain-side head first,—most of the time under flying clouds of snow-dust, until I plunged—fortunately feet down—into the compact mass at the bottom. Then a friend followed and dug me out, happening, by good luck, to begin his prospecting in just the right place.”
“But weren’t you smothered; and how did you feel going down?”
“Very nearly smothered; as to the feeling, it was merely a confused sense of noise, darkness, nothingness, nowhereness, and the sudden end of all things. Can you understand such a combination of sensations?
“Here in the park,” our friend continued, “we don’t mind the winter much. We have enough people to keep one another company, and we have no end of fun snowshoeing.”
“What sort of snow-shoes?” I break the silence to ask.
“The Norwegian skidors,—thin boards, ten or twelve feet long, and slightly turned up in front. There is an arrangement of straps about a third of the way back from the front end, and that’s all there is of it, though it’s a good deal if you don’t know how to manipulate—”
“Pedipulate, would hit it closer, wouldn’t it?”